This week’s kitchen sink for August 21, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses the paradox of great AI output, the cost of “cheap” 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! Déjà vu all over again! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for August 21 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 1,936 AI hallucination cases and counting. Generative AI might be driving a spike in pro se filings, but it is not leading to success in the courtroom.

Why Agreeing on Short Message Data Context is Critical: I covered this case earlier this week, but Kelly Twigger (who tipped me off to the case) dissects it in her latest blog post, comparing this case with the Lubrizol Corp. v. IBM Corp. case from 2023 and what the plaintiff could have done different in this case. Interesting read.

My Old Friend, “Conditional Relevance,” May Not Be Dead, But It Is on Life Support: Michael Berman discusses on the EDRM blog Federal Rule of Evidence 104(b), the concept of “conditional relevance” and the fact that the rule might be going away. Will this be relevant to you? It depends. 😉

The great prompter has a plan for everything and an answer for nothing: Rob Robinson discusses that because large language models now produce strategy decks, annual revenue and sales plans, marketing launch and engagement plans and more: “A pristine plan no longer proves that anyone did the planning.” It begins almost comically: “The plan arrived on time, ran 14 pages and read beautifully. Nobody in the room could explain it, least of all the person who wrote it, because no person wrote it.” 🤣

Microsoft kills off unsuccessful AI features while merging its separate Copilot apps: Microsoft is merging its Copilot-branded consumer and business apps, and ditching a number of unsuccessful AI features. According to Microsoft, consumers will lose access to Group Chats, AI-generated podcasts in Copilot, Copilot Labs experimental features, and Deep Research, by…today! Copilot will also ditch its goofy animated character for Copilot, named Mico, a floating blob that felt like an AI-ified version of Clippy, its infamous productivity assistant from years ago. Thoughts and prayers for Mico’s family. 😉

OpenAI Introduces ‘ChatGPT for Teens’ as Safety Concerns Grow: OpenAI announced a chatbot mode that will automatically limit some conversations to better protect young users. A great idea that will hopefully work. OpenAI requires people to provide their age while signing up for ChatGPT — under the terms of use, they must be 13 or older — but some lie. The company tracks more than 2,000 signals to detect whether a user is under 18, it said, in which case the chatbot will automatically turn on the teen mode. I’m sure it will never mistakenly tag someone as a teen. 🤣

Absolute Judicial Immunity Applies Even IF a Judge’s Decision Was “Wholly” Made by AI: A plaintiff asserting that a state court judge had used AI to decide his case, sued the judge in federal court. The federal court dismissed the case based on absolute judicial immunity. Michael Berman explains why on the EDRM blog.

The eight-hour clock starts today: EU e-evidence orders now land on covered U.S. providers’ EU addressees: And by “today”, I mean three days ago. But it was “today” when Rob Robinson wrote that judicial authorities in any of 26 EU member states can compel a covered service provider in another participating member state to produce data on a 10-day clock, or an eight-hour one in emergencies, with the certificate served on the provider’s designated EU addressee (where national arrangements are in place). Interesting.

The Cost of Cheap AI: Kristin Calve provides an interesting discussion about the fact that falling unit costs are encouraging organizations to consume much more AI, which is driving up the overall cost of delivering AI at scale. What does that mean for us? A shift from seat-based to consumption-based pricing. You never thought we weren’t going to be the ones eventually paying for it, right? 😉

AI Content Is Everywhere on Social Media, Especially LinkedIn.: Pangram, which launched a Chrome extension to help combat the rising AI slop problem on social media, also conducted research to see just how big the problem is. On four out of five platforms, longer content was more likely to be AI-generated than shortform content. LinkedIn was the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40% of longform posts flagged as fully AI-generated. If you include mixed AI and human content, X/Twitter was the worst off: almost half of X articles were either fully AI-generated (23.9%) or AI-assisted/mixed (22.9%), with only 53.2% of X articles flagging as fully human-authored. Wow.

Meta ran ads for an app promising to nudify female politicians: From the sublime to the ridiculous. Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material. It’s the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its platforms. Apple also needs to do a better job of keeping apps like this off their website. Sigh.

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for August 21, 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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