This week’s kitchen sink for December 19, 2025 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses how lawyers can cure AI hallucinations, waiver of work product disclosed to the FBI, GPT 5.2 vs. GPT 5.1, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year & more!

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! Son of a nutcracker! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for December 19, 2025 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 693 AI hallucination cases and counting! As I discussed in this post, here’s what’s causing all these AI hallucinations and how to fix it, IMHO.

Confidence Meets Complexity: Full Results from the 2H 2025 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey: I missed Rob Robinson’s post with the full results until this morning. Expect my normal full coverage of it here soon – in the meantime, see why Rob says “the sector has transitioned from post-pandemic volatility to a hardened state of resilience.”

Cross-Examine Your AI: The Lawyer’s Cure for Hallucinations: As Ralph Losey discusses on the EDRM blog, “[t]he solution [to the AI hallucination problem] is not fear or avoidance. It is preparation. Think of AI the way you think of an expert you are preparing to testify. You probe their reasoning.” Great way to put it.

Murder-suicide case shows OpenAI selectively hides data after users die: As the article discusses, OpenAI currently has no policy dictating what happens to a user’s data after they die; instead, their policy says that all chats—except temporary chats—must be manually deleted or else the AI firm saves them forever. The lawsuit alleges that “OpenAI won’t produce the complete chat logs”, but they have a duty to preserve them, so let’s see what happens here.

I put GPT-5.2 through a 14-round test, and the AI model raised some serious questions: After 10 text and 4 image tests, OpenAI’s latest model barely beats GPT-5.1. Hey, they said it would be the company’s “most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work”, but they didn’t say by how much! 😉

In A.I. Boom, Venture Capital Firms Are Raising Loads More Money: More reasons why this is an AI boom, not a bubble. One single venture firm has amassed more than $9 billion to invest in AI.

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year delivers a dismissive verdict on junk AI content: Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. Quantity does not equal quality.

No Waiver When Work Product Was Disclosed to FBI: Michael Berman discusses on the EDRM blog whether voluntary disclosure of work product to the FBI as part of a cooperative effort to investigate an alleged crime was a waiver of work product protection. As you can guess from the title, it was not. 😉

Texas sues TV makers for taking screenshots of what people watch: That “smart” TV may be smart on behalf of the TV manufacturer. “According to complaints filed this Monday in Texas state courts, the TV makers can allegedly use ACR technology to capture screenshots of television displays every 500 milliseconds, monitor the users’ viewing activity in real time, and send this information back to the companies’ servers without the users’ knowledge or consent.” Seriously, what isn’t tracking our activity these days? 😡

Smart Tech, Stronger Cases: Legal Tools in Litigation – Q1 2026 Facts & Findings: Sheila Grela’s article on the EDRM blog discusses several benefits of leveraging technology, use cases for applying it, the durable skills you need to pitch the tech to management, and five tips for pitching it. Nice! 😊

Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’?: According to this author, if you ask ChatGPT what its favorite food is, it will reply with “pizza”. But if you ask Claude and Gemini, they “prefaced their answers with caveats that they had no actual experience with food”. This is a big reason why OpenAI is facing lawsuits like the one above.

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for December 19, 2025! Back next year with another edition! Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!

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.