This week’s kitchen sink for January 30, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses fake citations at an AI conference, catastrophic warnings from Amodei, ChatGPT using Grokipedia & 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! Teddy! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for January 30 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 871 AI hallucination cases and counting (including this one we covered yesterday)! As I discussed in this post, here’s what’s causing all these AI hallucinations and how to fix it, IMHO.

Over 100 fake citations slip through peer review at top AI conference: Now, that’s funny! 🤣 As Stephen Abram noted: “AI detection company GPTZero found at least 100 hallucinated citations in 51 of 4,841 papers analyzed from the NeurIPS 2025 AI conference – despite the papers passing through peer review.” Why were they missed? Perhaps this is the reason: “Submissions to NeurIPS increased by more than 220 percent between 2020 and 2025, from 9,467 to 21,575, overwhelming the system. Distrust of reviewers is also growing, with some reportedly using AI tools instead of reading papers.” See, lawyers, you’re not alone! 😉

Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal: So, now you can get your Holocaust denial in your favorite AI chatbot! 🙄 Why trust Wikipedia when you can include the AI hallucinations and bias in your answers too? 😉

Facial Recognition Technology in Maryland Criminal Cases: One of two this week for Michael Berman on the EDRM blog. This one references his 13-minute YouTube blog discussing the Maryland authorities and touches on what prosecutors must do when looking to use Facial Recognition Technology (FRT).

TikTok USDS and the Rise of Structural Remedies in Platform Governance: Rob Robinson discusses the creation of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC – a majority American‑owned entity created to run the U.S. platform, safeguard U.S. user data, and manage the app, its code, and its recommendation system for American users – and what it means for information governance and eDiscovery professionals.

AI Boss Lays Out Our Potentially Catastrophic Future: In a new 38-page essay, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei discusses five categories of existential risk, including the potential for AI systems to act autonomously against human interests and the danger of bad actors using these tools to create biological weapons. The text also warns that powerful AI could enable totalitarian surveillance or cause rapid displacement of up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs in as little as one to five years. This while Anthropic is close to closing a funding round of around $20 billion that would value the start-up at around $350 billion. Apparently, he’s not that worried. 😏

Microsoft Pledged to Save Water. In the A.I. Era, It Expects Water Use to Soar.: Add depletion of natural resources as another category of existential risk (which Amodei eschews). After announcing an ambitious plan in 2020 to conserve water at the company’s growing fleet of data centers, the AI boom has taken Microsoft water usage from 7.9 billion liters in 2020 and 10.4 billion liters in 2024 to an expected 28 billion liters in 2030 (Microsoft updated that latter estimate to 18 billion liters, but that doesn’t include more than $50 billion in data center deals that the company signed last year. Sigh.

The $1.5 Billion Reckoning: AI Copyright and the 2026 Regulatory Minefield: Rob Robinson notes that “the era of ‘ask for forgiveness later’ has finally hit a $1.5 billion brick wall” with the settlement of Bartz v. Anthropic and discusses projected impacts here.

California Senate Bill 574 Proposes AI Regulations for Attorneys, Arbitrators: If this passes, lawyers could be breaking the law if they fail to personally verify AI outputs, including case citations (among other impacts)! So far, it’s only been introduced – we’ll see if it goes anywhere. 😏

Get in the Preservation Game: Kelly Twigger covers a case where plaintiff failed to preserve texts in violation of the parties’ ESI order, which was determined when his wife and brother produced text messages he should have produced. Next family gathering will be awkward! 🤣 Severe sanctions? Read it and find out.

Pinterest Announces Layoffs, Shift to ‘AI-Focused Roles’: Sadly, this helps illustrate one of Amodei’s points above.

ESI Protocol Disputes Were Resolved by Court: And by “disputes”, there are several, which Michael Berman unpacks in this post on the EDRM blog.

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for January 30, 2026! 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.