This colorful image was included in the State Appellate Defender Office’s brief recently filed with the Michigan Supreme Court in People v Soriano (Docket No. 167373).
Disclaimer: I don’t know whether SADO used any AI tools as a resource when deciding how to caption this image in its brief.
Even so, the image and SADO’s finalized filing is a chance to compare AI-output against the art of legal-writing persuasion.
For this exercise, I uploaded the image to Claude, ChatGPT 5, Gemini, and Perplexity Pro and prompted: Suggest alternative text for this image.
On the surface, each AI response was “okay”. A drafting start.
| Claude: “Promotional artwork for Netflix’s ‘The Midnight Gospel’ featuring the main character, a pink-skinned figure wearing a large pointed hat, sitting cross-legged in a cosmic, psychedelic environment. The character holds a cup and is surrounded by swirling galaxies, planets, floating eyeballs, and other surreal elements in vibrant colors including purples, oranges, and yellows. The Netflix logo appears in the top left corner, with the show’s title displayed in bold white letters.” |
| ChatGPT 5: Here are a few options for alternative text you could use for this image: Descriptive/Neutral: “Colorful illustration from the Netflix series The Midnight Gospel, showing the main character in a large purple wizard hat sitting with a mug in hand, surrounded by planets, comets, and strange creatures in space.” Concise: “Animated space scene with The Midnight Gospel character holding a cup under the title logo.” Accessible/Detailed: “Promotional art for Netflix’s The Midnight Gospel. A pink, cartoonish figure with a wizard hat and green headphones sits cross-legged holding a mug. Around them are bright cosmic colors, comets, planets, and surreal creatures, with the series title displayed in bold white letters.” Playful Tone: “A dreamy cartoon wizard lounges in space with a cup of tea while planets, comets, and quirky creatures float around, under the logo The Midnight Gospel.” |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro: Of course! Here are a few alternative text options for the image, ranging from simple to more detailed. Option 1 (Concise): Promotional art for the Netflix animated series “The Midnight Gospel,” showing the main character Clancy in a psychedelic space setting. Option 2 (Detailed): The main character of “The Midnight Gospel,” Clancy, a pink-skinned being with large green eyes, sits cross-legged in space wearing a large purple wizard hat and headphones. He holds a cup amidst a vibrant, star-dusted cosmos filled with colorful planets, a streaking comet, and other strange cartoon creatures. The show’s title is on the left. Option 3 (Short and Sweet): The title card for the animated show “The Midnight Gospel” on Netflix. |
| Perplexity Pro: A whimsical, colorful scene from “The Midnight Gospel” shows Clancy Gilroy, a pink-skinned character wearing a wizard hat and headphones, sitting in space with a mug, surrounded by planets, a comet, and eccentric animated beings. The Netflix logo appears in the upper corner, and the show’s title is displayed in bold, hand-drawn lettering. |
Persuasive legal writing requires more, however. SADO’s caption introduces other elements to advance the brief’s objective to inform and persuade.
SADO caption (emphasis added):
[CLOSED CAPTION] The image is a promotional cover for the show, The Midnight Gospel, depicting a cartoon drawing of a pink boy, wearing a wizard’s hat and big headphones, drinking his coffee while surrounded by the cosmos. In addition to planets, meteors, and a range of tie-dye-like colors, the drawing also contains some more unsettling characters on the periphery, including a demon with horns, an eyeball with a tadpole-like tail, and an octopus-like robot.
This is a good example of how AI-generated alt-text can be a legal-drafting start.
An effective legal writer will do more by adjusting the AI-response in a way that refines the focus and advances the brief’s argument theme.