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A UK law firm has put AI-generated wills on trial, and the chatbot didn't fare particularly well under cross-examination. SE Solicitors has taken an AI chatbot to task after asking it to draft a will for a fictional client, concluding that while the result looked convincing enough, it missed many of the questions a probate solicitor would normally ask before putting anything into writing. The firm asked the chatbot to prepare a will for "Daniel," an unmarried 42-year-old with two adult children, a £440,000 house, £10,000 in savings, a car, and a dog. Wills and probate senior associate Tom McInerney then reviewed the document to see how it stacked up. McInerney said the draft read well enough, but only until you start looking for the information and safeguards it omitted. "The rise of AI has allowed people to prepare legal documents themselves, and I completely understand that impulse," McInerney said. "But a will is not a letter or a cover note, it is a legally binding instrument that must hold up in court." According to the firm, the AI-generated document made no attempt to explore inheritance tax planning, lifetime gifts, pensions, life insurance, digital assets, trusts, or whether either child might be financially vulnerable. It also failed to ask whether Daniel had a partner, wanted to leave gifts to friends or charities, or wished to exclude anyone from inheriting. However, most of those omissions stem from the experiment itself. The chatbot could only work with what it was given, while a solicitor would typically spend time asking follow-up questions before drafting a will. "AI can't see the gaps because it has no idea about what you didn't tell it," McInerney said. "All it can ever produce is a will that fits the prompt, not the person." The firm also criticized the drafting itself. In one clause about the family dog, the chatbot left a placeholder instead of specifying how much money should be set aside for its care. It also failed to make that gift conditional on the named beneficiary actually taking the animal. SE Solicitors warned that relying on AI could lead consumers to overlook changes in inheritance tax rules or the need to review a will as their circumstances change due to marriage, divorce, children, property purchases, or other major life events. The law firm also addressed data privacy, noting that anyone who asks an AI platform to draft a will is likely handing over sensitive personal and financial information. Consumers may not fully understand how that data is stored or processed, it argued, particularly compared with the professional confidentiality obligations placed on solicitors. The exercise comes as AI is increasingly finding its way into legal work. SE Solicitors cites Google Trends data showing searches for "legal AI" have risen 312 percent over the past year. Separately, research commissioned by the Association of Lifetime Lawyers found 72 percent of UK adults aged 30 to 34 would consider using AI to write or update their will. Whether that means AI is ready to replace probate solicitors is another matter. In this experiment, the chatbot did exactly what it was asked to do: turn a paragraph of information into a will. SE Solicitors' argument is that writing the document is only part of the job: the harder part is asking all the questions that never made it into the prompt. ®

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It’s not uncommon to hear the refrain that it’s harder to write a short story versus a full-length novel; encountering powerful short fiction can feel akin to sitting in on a storytelling masterclass. In my reading life, especially as I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for short stories and fallen in love with novellas and novelettes, I’ve had the privilege of reading some of these unforgettable works. One of them is a science fiction story by a real genius of shorter tales. Ted Chiang wrote an emotional gut punch of a first contact novelette in “Story of Your Life,” later adapted into the Oscar-nominated film Arrival .

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

For anyone with a sense of wonder and curiosity about life beyond the stars, first contact stories promise cathartic exploration of the “what ifs,” and the best ones grapple with deeper themes tied to the human condition. An initial encounter and contact with alien life forms is bound to take established perspectives and long-held beliefs for a ride. In “Story of Your Life,” Chiang gives readers a compellingly intellectual look at linguistics through Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist recruited by the Army to decipher the language of and communicate with newly arrived extraterrestrials. We understand the tragic element of the story from the start, and it exquisitely sharpens the magnitude of each moment in the story, leaving you with a thousand tiny cuts by the end. In Arrival , the viewer is effectively convinced of the questions being asked by the story, and swept away by the drama of the encounter as well as the tension between Dr. Banks and her prickly colleague, only to be taken out by the tragedy in the form of a twist.

I’ve done the thing of comparing the original novelette and its adaptation before, by design, but I’m more inclined to take each on their own merits without pitting them against each other. I will say that I was more emotionally bereft from start to finish reading Chiang’s story, and that I would recommend watching the movie first since the twist is such a formidable piece of that screenplay.

“Story of Your Life” was originally published in Starlight 2 , an anthology edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, before being collected alongside more of Chiang’s short fiction in Stories of Your Life and Others . This was my introduction to the author, and what a way to get to know him. I remain blown away by his ability to drive so much depth and resonance into such brief works. This novelette will break your heart and put it back together again. It remains my all-time favorite first contact story.

What have you been reading lately? Let’s chat in the comments!

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I recently visited Audeze’s HQ in California for a revealing behind-the-scenes look at how one of the most premium audio brands goes about its business, from the science and developments behind the tech to the philosophy, people, and culture driving it.

As someone who covers gaming hardware and tech, one of my most pressing lines of inquiry during my visit was to really nail down why Audeze believes that planar magnetic drivers are superior for gaming audio and in gaming headsets like the Audeze Maxwell 2 .

And I got my answer: it’s the driver’s innate ability and technical functionality, but also what it allows a user to do afterwards.

All things transient

“Planar magnetic drivers have several fundamental performance advantages that benefit gaming,” Audeze marketing director Peter James tells me.

“One of those is better transient response … The driver is lighter, moves faster, reacts quicker to the changes in the signal, which means better precision and more realism.”

This can then equate to enhanced “immersion in a single-player game” or a “competitive advantage in a multiplayer game, where you're hearing more precisely and more quickly what's going on around you”, he says.

This is supported by the weighty opinion of Dragoslav Colich (or ‘Dr C’ for short), co-founder and chief technical officer of Audeze: “Transient response is much higher, so bass is much cleaner.”

If you’ve ever compared the likes of an Audeze Maxwell 2 to a competing dynamic driver gaming headset, then this is something you already know. I have had plenty of experience with overly muddy and thumping bass on many leading brands’ gaming sets, which are nowhere near as clean and detailed as the Maxwell 2’s.

Enhanced immersion and precision, regardless of whatever genre of game you're playing

The second major benefit of the drivers’ ability to offer lower distortion and the knock-on effects of that.

“Lower distortion, again, means versions of all those things you're hearing, [with] enhanced immersion and precision, regardless of whatever genre of game you're playing. But additionally, the low distortion enables better customization of the sound,” James argues.

This means planar magnetic drivers might not only sound better by default but can also allow you to tweak the sound profile more effectively than other sets.

“Because these drivers are so flexible and so low in distortion, they take EQ very easily and readily without creating even more distortion the way dynamic drivers often do, particularly when you boost bass,” he goes on. “This allows our headphones to be more customizable to people's individual tastes.”

So, better transient response for higher levels of precision and realism, lower distortion, and great flexibility in taking on EQs — and that’s on top of a level of audio quality that is, at least for me, incredible.