For a reporter, covering Legal Affairs in the Bay Area is a choice assignment.
There are many good cases, flamboyant lawyers, thoughtful judges, and mattersome trials. There are colossal frauds – think Theranos – and class actions with billions at issue – Roundup, as just one example. There are bare-knuckle fights over intellectual property – patents, copyrights, trademarks. And as good as all that all is, what makes the Bay Area special for a reporter are the titans of tech – brilliant, larger than life, and at the same time embarrassingly venal.
Each year I look for the special kind of case or cluster of cases that offers real insight into a social issue and then I go deep. I don’t just write about the suit when it is filed and settled. I like to explore the week to week maneuvering and strategizing. A big lawsuit in the hands of top-tier lawyers is hand-to-hand combat. I like to write about the fighting in the trenches. About the personalities. About judges when they get pissed off. About the lawyers who fight with each other over money, even though they are the same side.
In 2022, I fastened onto the cottage industry of lawyers who file cases for disabled clients and figured out how to take a righteous idea – getting rid of barriers to access – and turned it into a cash bonanza paid for by thousands of small business owners, many hanging on by a thread after COVID. My series “Righteous Greed” included dozens of stories.
In 2023, I wrote about the lawsuit that came to be a celebrated (or derided) case where Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu, enjoined San Francisco from clearing tent encampments without first giving the people displaced genuine offers of shelter. The case led me into a close look at how San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Housing spends (or misspends) its massive $700 million dollar budget. That series – 32 stories strong and still going – is called “Giving Shelter.”
In 2024, the fates favored San Francisco with a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk against Sam Altman and OpenAI, Inc over the development of the technology that is intended to create the first “Artificial General Intelligence” or AGI. AGI is an artificial intelligence that is so advanced that it is smarter than humankind in all, or almost all, areas of human endeavor. The case is still at its early stages but has already exposed the fault-line tension between developing technology for the people and developing technology for the money. We are calling this new series “Musk v. Altman.”
For this new series we are experimenting with a visual presentation that will forgo photography in favor of illustrations created by generative artificial intelligence using textual prompts composed by the author. Given the subject matter of the litigation, it seems appropriate to create the illustrations using the technology created by OpenAI (ChatGPT-4 with DALL-E).
As journalists we are fascinated by, and deeply suspicious of, AI. We do not use AI to write our stories. However, using generative AI to create fanciful illustrations and cartoons (clearly labeled and unlikely to mislead a reader) in aid of a related story seems like a perfect use-case to explore this aspect of the technology. We hope you will us know what you think. And for those interested in why a journalist who dabbles in cartooning is excited and depressed about generative AI, take a look at this story.
Finally, many thanks to the talented Glenn Gehlke who designs the beautiful presentation of these stories, Chloe Lee Rowlands who has both encouraged and enabled this project on our platform, and Kat Rowlands, our publisher, who embraces innovation even as she fights for rigor and quality in every aspect of our journalism.
Musk v. Altman: Tech titans battle over the future of all humankind
The most important lawsuit in the history of the world was filed Thursday in the Superior Court of San Francisco County. At least that is how this report would begin were it written in the style of the lawsuit Elon Musk has brought against Sam Altman and OpenAI, Inc. the creators of ChatGPT. This series of articles explores that lawsuit and its possible ramifications for AI technology, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the future of all humankind.
