Here’s the kitchen sink for May 23, 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. For more great eDiscovery memes, follow Gates Dogfish on LinkedIn here! He must have authored some of the stories below! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for May 23, 2025 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

Billable Hour Dying So Slowly, You’d Think It’s Billing By The Hour: See what Joe Patrice did there? 😉 Joe covers recent survey results with some interesting findings that show the billable hour still rules, but more firms of all sizes are also doing some flat-fee billing too. I’m not going to say progress is slow, but if it picks up soon, it might start moving faster than glaciers. 🤣

The AI Mullet: Transforming Government with Hybrid Intelligence: Rob Robinson introduces us to a new term – the AI “mullet”: hybrid AI architectures that combine Small Language Models (SLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). I guess the SLMs are the business in the front and the LLMs are the party in the back. 😉

New Orleans called out for sketchiest use of facial recognition yet in the US: Apparently, New Orleans police are secretly using facial recognition to identify suspects in real time—in seeming defiance of a city ordinance designed to prevent false arrests and protect citizens’ civil rights and have been doing so for years. A Washington Post investigation uncovered the “dodgy” practice.

Bots Battle for Supremacy in Legal Reasoning – Part Five: Reigning Champion, Orion, ChatGPT-4.5 Versus Scorpio, ChatGPT-o3: If you think this sounds like a face-off coordinated and judged by Ralph Losey (on the EDRM blog), you’re right. As usual, Ralph gives us deep analysis and lots of AI-generated images, to boot. Want to know who wins? Read the article. 🤔

Windows 11’s most important new feature is post-quantum cryptography. Here’s why.: Spoiler alert, it’s because you need it to withstand future cyberattacks from quantum computers, which will be able to break current encryption algorithms.

Google Unveils A.I. Chatbot, Signaling a New Era for Search: Google is introducing a new feature in its search engine called A.I. Mode. The tool will function like a chatbot and is just one of the announcements they unveiled at I/O 2025. Why are so many people “gung-ho” about AI? Simple, it’s where the money is going. 🤑

Fortnite’s Darth Vader Is A.I.-Powered. Voice Actors Are Rebelling.: I think many people know that Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, struck an agreement with James Earl Jones (and then his estate after he died) to use his voice in the game. That wasn’t enough for SAG-AFTRA, the union representing tens of thousands of actors, which filed an unfair labor practice charge that said the use of AI to generate Jones’s voice in Fortnite had violated the union’s right to negotiate changes to its bargaining agreement. Hey, at least they fixed the AI Darth Vader profanity problem!

Profanity and Threats Are Not a “Good Faith” Conference: Hey, profanity doesn’t look good whether it’s an AI Darth Vader or plaintiffs’ counsel, which (according to the court) directed “strong profanity” at counsel for Defendants while meeting and conferring about the subjects of the Motion, and issued threats to “triple the [settlement] demand” to make the suit impossible to settle if Defendants refused to comply with Plaintiffs’ counsel’s demands. As Michael Berman noted in the EDRM blog, the motion denial is “an unremarkable holding arising from remarkable facts.” Indeed.

“Microsoft has simply given us no other option,” Signal says as it blocks Windows Recall: Signal Messenger is warning the users of its Windows Desktop version that the privacy of their messages is under threat by Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store almost everything a user does every three seconds. Even though it’s opt-in now instead of opt-out, if a user has turned it on, it will index things like Zoom meetings and Signal conversations – without the consent of the people interacting with that user. Oh, and its controls aren’t working that great – Recall continued to screenshot payment card details of a researcher analyzing the product. Yeesh! 🪰

OpenAI Wins Dismissal of Lawsuit Alleging ChatGPT-Generated Defamation: Remember this case, where the plaintiff alleged that ChatGPT had incorrectly stated he was being sued for embezzlement in a summary of a lawsuit that it produced for a journalist? The court granted summary judgment in favor of OpenAI, citing First Amendment protections. One less case for OpenAI to worry about – for now.

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for May 23, 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.

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