Here’s the kitchen sink for October 18, 2024 of ten stories that I didn’t get to this week – with another brand-new meme from Gates Dogfish!

Why “the kitchen sink”? Find out here! 🙂

The Kitchen Sink is even better when you can include a brand-new eDiscovery meme courtesy of Gates Dogfish, the meme channel dedicated to eDiscovery people and created by Aaron Patton of Trustpoint.One (which is a partner of eDiscovery Today!). For more great eDiscovery memes, follow Gates Dogfish on LinkedIn here! AI is in a Good Place right now! Or is it? See what I did there? 😀

Here is the kitchen sink for October 18, 2024 of eleven stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

Managing eDiscovery Teams and Rampant Burnout: I’ve read two articles this week about burnout and mental health struggles of eDiscovery professionals. This one does a good job of discussing some of the reasons related to burnout. If this describes any of you, I encourage you to reach out – our industry is full of terrific people willing to help, including me.

His daughter was murdered. Then she reappeared as an AI chatbot.: Sad story. If this doesn’t convince you that AI models need to keep personal images and data out of their algorithms, I don’t know what will.

How Many Legal Jobs Will be Affected by AI? Law Firms Can’t Agree: A survey of a selection of the U.K.’s top 30 law firms by revenue found a wide range of views when asked what proportion of jobs are likely to be altered by AI in the next five years. I can tell them the answer: all of them will be affected.

Parents sue son’s high school history teacher over AI ‘cheating’ punishment: Knew this would happen at some point. Parents claim he was only using AI for research and creating an outline (i.e., idea generation) and that the school’s AI policy was added to the student handbook after the plaintiff’s son was punished. Sounds like they have a legitimate beef. Expect more disputes like this to come.

Loneliness Pandemic: Can Empathic AI Friendship Chatbots Be the Cure?: Ralph Losey discusses a Harvard and Wharton Study on the EDRM blog about whether chatting with AI chatbots can help lonely people feel less lonely – at least in the short term. Apparently it can! 😮

Discovery Dispute: “Both cannot be true.”: This case, covered by Michael Berman on the EDRM blog, would make a great Judge Andrew J. Peck Rule 1.1 case. In it, the Court calls the defendant to task and suggests the potential that they hid the ball. Ruh-roh! 😐

[Podcast] When Reports Speak: Generative AI Conversations on eDiscovery in the Summer of 2024: I have to admit – I’m addicted to Google’s NotebookLM (which I covered here last week). Rob Robinson describes the three sources that go into creating the AI-generated podcast, which he published on ComplexDiscovery. Sounds like the start of a new podcast series on ComplexD! Cool! 😀

Data Center Energy Demand Spurs Tech Giants to Rethink Power Sources: As Rob notes, AI companies are going nuclear over the need for more power for their AI models. Literally.

Microsoft and OpenAI’s Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying: First, “Bennifer” files for divorce, and now this?!? If these two can’t keep it together, what chance do the rest of us have? 😉

Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities: Apparently, adding in irrelevant “red herrings” into math/logic problems led to “catastrophic performance drops” in accuracy, ranging from 17.5 percent to a whopping 65.7 percent, depending on the model tested! That doesn’t seem reasonable! 😀

Man learns he’s being dumped via “dystopian” AI summary of texts: It’s not you, it’s AI! 😉 The dude received a “surprising” alert on his iPhone 15 Pro, delivered through an early test version of Apple’s upcoming Apple Intelligence text message summary feature. “No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from the apartment,” the AI-penned message reads, summing up the content of several separate breakup texts from his girlfriend. He followed that up on social media, by saying: “Yes this was real / yes it happened yesterday / yes it was my birthday”. Ouch! Sounds like he needs an AI chatbot to get his through this! 😀

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for October 18, 2024! Back next week with another edition!

So, what do you think? Is this useful as an end of the week wrap-up? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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