Okay, I read the article and it's really left me with more questions, and with minimal indication that this is actually a Chinese government-run biolab in the US. I'd like more information before making a decision on that.
The Chinese owner of an unauthorized central California lab that fueled conspiracy theories about China and biological weapons has been arrested on charges of not obtaining the proper permits to manufacture tests for COVID-19, pregnancy and HIV, and mislabeling some of the kits.
Also note, the OP article is not originally from AOL. AOL is quoting another article from a “Scripps News”, practically in its entirety without any additional journalism on their part. If they had done any journalism, they would have found the AP article I linked with more info or the DoJ article on the charges that were brought up.
The thing that really irritated me was the bit about "ooh, they're using equipment from China, that proves it!" I mean, no shit? Find me a lab, an office, a home, anything manmade in the US that doesn't have something made in China in it :/
Iirc, USA and China have labs in which they collaborate, in both nations. I’m wondering if this is one of those labs, and what exactly our governments are getting up to?
The Chinese owner of an unauthorized central California lab that fueled conspiracy theories about China and biological weapons has been arrested on charges of not obtaining the proper permits to manufacture tests for COVID-19, pregnancy and HIV, and mislabeling some of the kits.
It’s old AF news and Scripps News is the one doing the reporting, AOL, like MSN and Yahoo, and the Hill, just rehosts “news” articles, they have no actual journalists on staff, just “news” outlets that pay them to be on their front page.
Also this place wasn’t a “Wuhan lab” it was a medical test manufacturer that also had a shitload of bio waste onsite that needs to be cleaned up as it’s a threat to public health.
Almost a month ago that charges were brought up. Interesting that this article from 3 days ago is claiming so many unknowns and mystery about this facility since it’s really old news and most of those questions have been answered:
It definitely is. They go out of their way to avoid mentioning that they discovered they were making testing kits for various infectious diseases (which explains why you’d want samples of said diseases).
This information was in the original report that broke the story and the in the charging report:
According to court documents, between December 2020 and March 2023, Zhu and others manufactured, imported, sold, and distributed hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 test kits, in addition to test kits for HIV, pregnancy, clinical urinalysis, and other conditions in the United States and China.
As I mentioned in a comment below, the word “test” appears nowhere in the “Scripps News” report.
This is old AF and the only thing really going on with this place is that the people running it were disgusting pigs who could care less about bio waste disposal regulations, this place needed to be shutdown because it was a public health threat.
It never should have been active in the first place.
I have to wonder who is in charge of monitoring medical supply orders entering from China, and who’s watching over businesses that have dozens of shell companies that are able to run bio weapons’ manufacturing on foreign soil?
It’s absolutely not a bio weapons lab. It’s a COVID test manufacturing facility, they had a horribly ran research facility that was not properly disposing of their bio waste that they used for their research. So basically they weren’t properly disposing of the COVID samples that they were using for their research for creating the COVID testing equipment that they were manufacturing. There is nothing scary about except corporate and foreign disregard for rules and regulations in something pertaining to public health, this company should be barred from operating in California and the greater US as well as other WHO sponsored nations.
The story is months old and this is basically just clickbait for the conspiracy chucklefucks.
Unlicensed at the city, state and federal level. The 1000 mice were bioengineered to grow COVID antibodies but (the CDC also) found “infectious agents in the refrigerators including E. coli, coronavirus, malaria, hepatitis B and C, dengue, chlamydia, human herpes, rubella and HIV.” Source
I had to setup up my grandfather’s new computer with aol, even though he was connected via a cable modem that was always on anyway. That was a throwback for sure.
Yes. It was a promotional CD with the installer for the aol program and access phone numbers for dial up.
They typically gave you a month or some amount of free hours as a promotion.
There were millions of them sent out to encourage people to get on the internet at a time when home PCs were still relatively uncommon and internet more so.
There is an ancient meme of a throne made entirely of ail CDs from the dark ages of the internet.
I saw an article from ars that tracked the AI company down, it’s registered to the same office as the lawyer, and immediately started advertising this case bragging about it being used in an actual trial, no mention of how much it fucked up and the client was guilty.
He’s got a pretty good shot at this, and the lawyer should 100% face consequences. Even if he just used it, but especially if he owns the AI company he used. Doubly so for not disclosing the connection or informing the client it was being used.
But how do you tell if the AI performed worse or better than the lawyer. What is the bar here for competence. What if it was a losing case regardless and this is just a way to exploit the system for a second trial.
I don’t know about this particular lawyer, but I have heard that some lawyers will try novel court strategies, knowing that it’s a win-win situation. If the strategy works, then their clients benefit, and if the strategy doesn’t work, their clients get an appeal for having ineffective counsel where they normally wouldn’t have an appeal.
If a client gets an appeal for ineffective counsel how is that counsel not brought up before the bar for review? That seems like a death knell for a lawyer.
Not sure if there is a procedure for when a lawyer is practicing, I have never heard of a bar referral after a ruling on a motion for ineffective assistance in NY, but I have heard of retiring attorneys landing on the grenade so to speak and writing affidavits claiming that anything they may have touched in the slightest was somehow deficient, spoiled or tainted by their involvement if it can get a shot at more billable work/appeal.
People don’t generally get sanctioned for making honest mistakes. I didn’t say that a lawyer would tank the case on purpose, just that they’d try a new strategy. If no lawyers were allowed to try new strategies without facing penalties, that also seems like a bad system.
In my opinion, how good the AI performed is irrelevant. What is is the fact that an AI was used instead of the lawyer.
If it is proven that the lawyer used what the AI delivered verbatim then it doesn’t matter how good that text was. The client has the right to have a lawyer, not an AI pretending to be a lawyer.
Autocorrect does single words and you usually review each word. Something like ChatGPT will generate an entire document for you, it’s up to you if you want to verify the correctness of everything in there, which most people don’t.
I think its a good use. I think the idiotic thing is how it was used. It sounds like he didn’t validate it after which might just be unfamiliar with using new tech. Might be a lawyer looking to get a new trial. Might be just pure incompetence. But I still think its a good use if used correctly
Well, the lawyer gave interviews after his client was guilty. Bragging about how instead of spending hours on it he only spent “seconds” and that the AI would mean he could have a lot more clients and make a lot more money.
So, it’s going to be pretty hard for him to now argue he put in just as much effort.
But that is like saying instead of spending hours on an essay I cut the time in half with ms word. Its just a tool. If the lawyer produced arguments with it and reviewed it then what’s the issue. And tbjs still doesn’t determine if the work presented was good or not.
But in all seriousness I think we all need a pocket lawyer.
Its one of those things that I think causes a ton if inequality. I think its too early but definitely in our lives we could all have a bunch of services in our pocket that are difficult to access now. But that’s not going to happen if we don’t reject this stuff as idiotic.
That’s irrelevant. The AI is not licensed to practice law; so if the lawyer didn’t perform any work to check the AI output, then then the AI was the one defending the client and the lawyer was just a mouthpiece for the AI.
But is it a mistrial if the lawyer uses autocorrect?
If the lawyer reviewed the output and found it acceptable then how can you argue it was practicing law. I can write an argument I wantm feed it to AI to correct and improve and iterate through the whole thing. Its just a robust auto correct.
But is it a mistrial if the lawyer uses autocorrect?
No, that’s a bad question. Autocorrect takes your source knowledge and information as input and makes minor corrections to spelling and suggestions to correct grammar. It doesn’t come up with legal analysis on its own, and any suggestions for grammar changes should be scrutinized by the licensed professional to make sure the grammar changes don’t affect the argument.
And your second statement isn’t what happened here. If the lawyer had written an argument and then fed it to AI to correct and improve, then that would have the basis of starting with legal analysis written from a licensed professional. In this case, the lawyer bragged that he spent only seconds on this case instead of hours because the AI did everything. If he only spent seconds, then he very likely didn’t start the process with writing his own analysis and then feeding it to AI; and he likely didn’t review the analysis that was spit out by the AI.
This is an issue that is happening in the medical world, too. Young doctors and med students are feeding symptoms into AI and asking for a diagnosis. That is a legitimate thing to use AI for as long as the diagnosis that gets spit out is heavily scrutinized by a trained doctor. If they just immediately take the outputs from AI and apply the standard medical treatment for that without double checking whether the diagnosis makes sense, then that isn’t any better than me typing my symptoms into Google and looking at the results to diagnose myself.
I watched the legal eagle video about another case where they submitted documents straight from an LLM with hallucinated cases. I can agree that’s idiotic. But if there are a ton of use cases for these things in a lot of profession’s that I think these types of incidents might leave people assuming that using it is idiotic.
My concern is that I think there’s a lot of people trying to convince people to be afraid or suspicious of something that is very useful because they might be threatened either their career or skills are now at risk of being diminished and so they come up with these crazy stories.
Yeah I feel like this is the same as if the lawyer had used a crystal ball to decide how to handle a case. If he lied to clients about it or was also selling crystal ball reading services that seems pretty bad.
This reads like 60s era rules that never got updated. Hell it sounds like big puffy afros from the 60s/70s were meant to maliciously comply with that haircut rule.
Seems like his violations are a result of being asked to not wear his hair like that and him refusing, and one act of tardiness. So yes, it’s his hair. That’s the reason, and they don’t feel the need to explain themselves.
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