Women Talkin' 'Bout AI
We're Jessica and Kimberly – two non-computer scientists who stumbled into the world of generative AI right alongside everyone else when ChatGPT 3 was released. Since then, we've pivoted our careers to explore the capabilities and limitations of generative AI in teaching, learning, and research. But we're more than just academics –we're also mothers, friends, and colleagues, so of course our conversations sometimes wander into the broader landscape of life.
Women Talkin' 'Bout AI
Hallucinations, Hype, and Hope: Rebecca Fordon on AI in Legal Research
In this episode of Women Talkin’ ’Bout AI, we sit down with Rebecca Fordon — law librarian, professor, and board member of the Free Law Project — to talk about how generative AI is transforming legal research, education, and the meaning of “expertise.”
Rebecca helps us cut through the hype and ask harder questions: What problem are we really trying to solve with AI? Why are we using certain tools, and do we even know what data they’re built on?
We talk about:
🔹 How AI is reshaping the practice of legal research and what it means for the next generation of lawyers.
🔹 Why hallucinated case law and “certainty amplification” reveal deeper problems of trust and transparency.
🔹 The tension between speed and substance, and how “saving time” can actually shift where thinking happens.
🔹 The expert pipeline problem: what happens when AI replaces the messy, formative parts of learning?
🔹 How law librarians (and educators everywhere) are taking on the role of translators, bridging human judgment and machine outputs.
🔹 The open-access movement in law and how the Free Law Project is democratizing legal data.
At its heart, this episode is about reclaiming curiosity, caution, and critical thinking in a field that depends on precision, and remembering that faster isn’t always smarter.
Learn more:
🔗 Free Law Project: https://free.law
🔗 AI Law Librarians: https://ailawlibrarians.com
🔗 Aaron Tay's musings about librarianship: https://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/
🔗 Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide: https://refusinggenai.wordpress.com/
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