This week’s kitchen sink for July 17, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses xAI suing its own users, the Hershey bar analogy for AI & 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! Hey, they both offer “utility”! 🤣

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

We’re up to 1,769 AI hallucination cases and counting. In response, one law school says we should party like it’s 1979! 🤯

Surprise, Surprise: More Evidence That What You Say To Your Chatbot Isn’t Always Private: As Stephen Embry notes, it could be requested via subpoena in your litigation case. Customers or subscribers can’t move to quash the subpoena – only the service provider can. Your best bet is to try to suppress use of the evidence later on. FYI.

Glass Houses Proverb—Don’t Throw Stones and Invective: Michael Berman covers this case on the EDRM blog which is another example of AI hallucinated cases, with a twist. This quote from the Court says a lot: “Counsel in this brief advanced each assertion in the most strident register available and then abandoned each one the moment the Court asked him to produce its foundation, offering no defense because he had none. His opening explanations were that this Court was reading ‘the wrong corrected brief,’ … and that the filing was ‘a draft,” …. This version of the ‘dog ate my homework defense’ will not hunt.” Wild case.

Narcissistic individuals are more prone to problematic use of generative AI: They probably think the “I” in “AI” refers to them! 😉 Seriously though, narcissists are apparently “spending excessive amounts of time interacting with AI systems”. Ruh-roh! Are we all narcissists? 🤣

Data Centers to Add Billions in Power Costs in 13 States: $6.3 billion to be exact, thanks to PJM, the nation’s largest electrical grid operator. The high costs so angered Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro that he sued PJM in December 2024. Mr. Shapiro and PJM reached a settlement that capped the price set by the auction, saving consumers billions of dollars. Sounds like more lawsuits are in order. This as New York announced the nation’s first statewide moratorium on construction of data centers for one year.

I let ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork loose on my files – only one made me nervous: Lengthy post primarily reviewing ChatGPT Work but also discussing Claude Cowork. So, which one makes him nervous? See for yourself.

Drivers Sue Uber Over AI Manipulation: Another claim of a company allegedly using AI against its employees. Here, Uber drivers allege that Uber uses AI systems to predict lowest fares drivers will accept and manipulates their behavior using “slot machine-like” tactics.

Musk’s xAI sues Grok user over sexualized ‘deepfakes’: What do you do when your users are using your tool to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM)? Sue them, of course. Much easier than fixing the tool so that they can’t do it, right? While the claim that the user violated the company’s terms of service may be valid, this still seems a bit like passing the buck to me.

New method aims to keep kids safe from illegal AI-generated content: Here’s a much better approach to the problem. Researchers have developed an auditing technique to test GenAI models for malicious capabilities, and they can do that without prompting them for outputs of CSAM, which is illegal. How good is it? Their method was 100 percent accurate in identifying models that had been adapted to generate CSAM. I sure hope this helps eliminate the problem.

In-House Lawyers Are The Biggest AI Users: Joe Patrice discusses some startling findings on Above the Law: Harmonic Security, which sells AI governance software, analyzed 1,935,247 classified AI-session minutes across its enterprise client base and broke the results out by department. Legal and governance finished first at 19.5 percent of all AI hours. Go to Market — sales, marketing, business development, the entire revenue organization — came in second at 17.7. Design and development took third at 13.3. As Joe notes, the Go to Market portion of a business is typically way larger than Legal and governance, so it’s even more impressive. And Legal is also, by a distance, the best-behaved department in the study, with only 4 percent of its AI time running on free personal accounts. Who’s the Luddites now? 😉

What’s In A Wrapper? Comparing A Hershey Bar To LegalTech AI: Are “legaltech startups offering nothing more than a “thin wrapper” around an LLM”? Ken Crutchfield discusses it in this guest post on Bob Ambrogi’s LawSites blog. Reading it will make you hungry…to learn more. 🤣

SharePoint attackers are stealing the keys, and patching alone will not evict them: Rob Robinson discusses what might be the scariest case of squatters (from a cyber perspective) yet: patching an actively exploited SharePoint Server flaw does not evict attackers holding SharePoint Internet Information Services (IIS) machine keys. There goes the neighborhood! 😉

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for July 17, 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.

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