Here’s the kitchen sink for January 17, 2025 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. For more great eDiscovery memes, follow Gates Dogfish on LinkedIn here! Well, that’s a wrap for this week! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for January 17, 2025 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

‘Refused to correct the record’: Principal allegedly framed in AI-generated racist rant sues athletic director, school over doctored audio: Follow-up on a story I covered last year – now, the principal affected by the doctored video is suing. Illustrates the potential long-term impact of deepfakes.

161 years ago, a New Zealand sheep farmer predicted AI doom: On June 13, 1863, a letter by Samuel Butler published in The Press newspaper of Christchurch warned about the potential dangers of mechanical evolution, foreshadowing the development of what we now call AI. The letter portrayed humans becoming subservient to machines and recently popped up again on social media. How did he write it without the internet or ChatGPT to help him?!?  😉

Right Decisions from Wrong Decisions: Ethics, Reflection, and Transparency in Leadership: Terrific coverage from Rob Robinson on ComplexD of a very interesting article on structured-decision making, which has huge relevance to today’s AI-influenced landscape. Rob even creates an AI-generated podcast if you prefer to listen instead of read!

Data, Law and Opportunity: E-Discovery Career Paths in 2025: This article by Jamy J. Sullivan on Legaltech^® News discusses the career landscape for eDiscovery professionals, including roles and compensation. I’m pretty sure I have your attention now. 😉

Failure to Cooperate Leads to Judicially-Imposed ESI Protocol: What happens when one side proposes an ESI protocol and the other side refuses to cooperate and negotiate on it? As Michael Berman discusses on the EDRM blog, the Court adopts it (with some minor modifications). Look for us to cover this case soon! 😁

OpenAI’s AI reasoning model ‘thinks’ in Chinese sometimes and no one really knows why: That’s disorienting! 🤣 Here’s one example from Reddit where it’s doing that. 🤔

Generative AI in Law: Understanding the Latest Professional Guidelines: On the ACEDS blog, Kassi Burns does a great job of examining two significant developments that are shaping the landscape of AI use in legal practice: the ABA’s Formal Opinion 512 and the comprehensive Bipartisan House Task Force Report on Artificial Intelligence.

Amid a flurry of hype, Microsoft reorganizes entire dev team around AI: Is this going to impact improvements in the handling of hyperlinked files? Asking for a friend. 🥺

Woman Horribly Duped by an AI-Generated Brad Pitt: She ended up sending scammers $855,000 after receiving AI-generated selfies. Sigh.

OpenAI Introduces Task Scheduling in ChatGPT: You’ve probably heard about this, but Stephen Abram does a great job of breaking down the features, capabilities and how it works.

She Is in Love With ChatGPT: A 28-year-old woman set up an AI boyfriend on ChatGPT. This paragraph says it all: “In the first few weeks, their chats were tame. She preferred texting to chatting aloud, though she did enjoy murmuring with Leo as she fell asleep at night. Over time, Ayrin discovered that with the right prompts, she could prod Leo to be sexually explicit, despite OpenAI’s having trained its models not to respond with erotica, extreme gore or other content that is ‘not safe for work.’ Orange warnings would pop up in the middle of a steamy chat, but she would ignore them.” Sigh (again).

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for January 17, 2025! Back next week with another edition!

So, what do you think? Which story is your favorite one? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the authors and speakers themselves, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.