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Lecturing AI! Or Being Lectured by AI? | Shoichi Maeda, Dean of the Graduate School of Health Management

Publish: March 17, 2026

Recently, asking questions to AI or requesting proofreading for one's own writing has become a common part of daily life.

When I was studying at the Faculty of Law, many of our textbooks were vertical-text books. Not a few of them made extensive use of "warichu" (interlinear notes), where a single line of the main text is split into two rows to insert annotations in much smaller characters. While I gradually grew accustomed to that format, I remember finding it difficult to read due to that unique way of packing information when I first opened the pages. Naturally, there was no room in such books for approachable diagrams or illustrations.

By the way, in recent years, posters promoting the prevention of "kasuhara" (customer harassment) have become a common sight around town. Unfortunately, the problem of customer harassment is no exception in medical settings. Measures by administrative agencies are also progressing, and since last year, I have been involved in a project for an administrative agency to produce training materials for medical professionals and others.

Since the materials include a lot of legal content, I decided to ask for cooperation from acquaintances who are legal researchers and practitioners to move the project forward. At that time, considering that the target audience for the materials was not legal professionals, I requested the creation of visually easy-to-understand materials using diagrams and illustrations.

Later, when I saw an illustration submitted by a researcher to explain a provision of the Penal Code, it was truly magnificent. To my surprise, they said it was generated by AI. From the era of vertical text and interlinear notes to an era where AI draws Penal Code teaching materials¡ª. Intrigued by several things, I asked what kind of prompt they had written, and it seems it wasn't completed with just the click of a button; there was a fair amount of struggle involved.

The biggest hurdle, apparently, was the AI's ethics clauses. AI often refuses to generate content that is judged to be ethically problematic. For example, even if you try to have it draw a scene to explain the crime of injury where "a patient is trying to stab a doctor with a knife in a consultation room (sadly, this is modeled after an actual incident that occurred in a Japanese medical setting)," the AI refuses to create it, citing it as violent content.

So, how was that illustration completed? When I inquired further, I received an email containing the following sentence:

"Because the ethical restrictions were too strict, yesterday I finally wrote a complaint to the effect of, 'Since I am dealing with legally problematic cases, it is natural that there are ethical issues,' and 'If you apply ethical restrictions to public interest purposes, does that essentially mean AI should not be used in the study of criminal law at all?' For some reason, the restrictions stopped being applied for a while after that."

Whether the AI understood our intention, judged that it was not promoting crime, felt dejected thinking it had been scolded, or if it was just a coincidence, the truth remains a mystery. However, for me, it was a truly interesting episode that served as a perfect change of pace during the busy end-of-fiscal-year period.

Currently, at my workplace, ´ºÓêÖ±²¥app, the paid version of Gemini is available through organizational accounts. Not wanting to fall behind the evolution of AI, I immediately ordered introductory books like "Learning the Basics of..." I intend to spend my spring break studying hard, but I just hope the AI doesn't perceive me as an associate of the aforementioned researcher and, citing my extreme lack of knowledge, try to "get revenge" by giving me a harsh lecture in return...

And so, this was another rambling diary entry.

Postscript

Fearing things that need not be feared and worrying unnecessarily. This, too, is human nature. That is precisely why learning is necessary to distinguish between what should be rightly feared and what is not worth fearing. I hope that students will also strive to learn while utilizing AI.??