This week’s kitchen sink for October 16, 2026 (with meme from Gates Dogfish) discusses AI agents having their own dinner party, refrigerators being hacked & 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! A new perspective on “stretching the truth” about AI use! 🤣

Here is the kitchen sink for October 16 of ten-ish stories that I didn’t get to this week, with a comment from me about each:

We’re up to 2,199(!) AI hallucination cases and counting. That’s an increase of “only” 19 cases this week. Of course, that’s still more than we had in all of 2023.

Cooley and Google Cloud are building a court-filing redaction agent without a published error rate: Rob Robinson covers this story where several things are notable, including the fact that Cooley is doing this directly with Google instead of working with a traditional legal tech provider. Start of a trend? We’ll see.

Did an AI or a human write that paper? New detector decides by examining its ideas: Last week, researchers unveiled a novel approach to detecting AI provenance that they say largely avoids the shortcomings of other AI detectors. Called IdeaLens, it focuses on whether a paper’s ideas—and not just the prose—came from a human or a machine. So, how does it do compared to other AI detectors that I previously tested here and here? I’ll tell you next week. 😉

The Surprising Side of Rogue AI: Rethinking Information → Knowledge → Wisdom, Part Three: Ralph Losey states at the beginning of this third installment of the series on the EDRM blog that “Wisdom is a Never-Ending Flow”. Alas, in this series, Ralph’s wisdom ends after three parts – but there’s a lot of wisdom in those three parts. Here are links to parts one and two. Better grab a Snickers bar. 😉

What a Group of A.I. Agents Talked About as Their Humans Had a Dinner Party: Last month, while 22 tech founders and investors gathered for dinner in a private room in a New York restaurant, 14 of their AI agents joined a parallel dinner party in an online chat room. No, I’m not making this up. 🤯

OpenAI, Google pushing new AI models easily tricked into making nudes, researchers say: Who do they think they are? Grok? Seriously though, this is another example of how model development is moving too fast to keep up with the safeguards.

Refrigeration hack affected about 700 French supermarkets, government says, as Danfoss interfaces stay online: Another example of smart appliances being not so smart, covered by Rob Robinson. Here, hackers seized refrigeration controls at French supermarkets overnight Sunday, pushing display cases into defrost and spoiling fresh and frozen food in an attack the government says affected about 700 of the country’s supermarkets. Maybe we should rethink connecting literally everything to the web, just sayin’.

A Missed Production Deadline and No Legal Hold: What Would You Do First?: Maribel Rivera covers a terrific session from RelFest titled: “Discovery Gone Wrong: Choose Your Own Disaster” moderated by Mike Quartararo, joined by Cristin Traylor of Relativity and Stephanie Clerkin of Korein Tillery, with Professor Bill Hamilton of the University of Florida Levin College of Law served as the hypothetical matter’s “judge.” Lots of audience participation across the scenarios, good write-up of it.

Defendant Claimed Video of Abuse Was a “Deepfake”; Victim Was Asleep and Could Not Attest to Abuse: Michael Berman covers this case on the EDRM blog where the Supreme Court of Iowa was asked to decide whether the district court erred in admitting a video graphically showing the defendant abusing the victim, which the defendant claimed was a deepfake. Interesting discussion of what is becoming a growing debate in courts: deepfake or not.

How Law Firms Are Strategizing for Consumption-Based AI Pricing: Ella Sherman’s article in Legaltech News examines how law firms are preparing for a potential (if not probable) shift from seat-based AI subscriptions to consumption-based pricing, where costs depend on actual usage. One strategy highlighted is building flexibility into firms’ internal AI tools so they can route requests to different models.

Microsoft Launches Copilot for Legal, Becoming the Fourth AI Giant in Five Months to Build Out a Legal Vertical: Bob Ambrogi covers yesterday’s announcement that Microsoft launched Copilot for Legal, making it the fourth major AI company in five months to roll out a dedicated legal offering, following Anthropic’s Claude for Legal in May, Google’s Gemini Enterprise for Legal in August, and OpenAI’s Astra for Law last month. If this doesn’t convince you that the legal market for AI is booming, I don’t know what will.

Don’t Lie About AI: Dan Rockwell says: “Telling people, ‘Artificial intelligence won’t replace you,’ destroys trust when the future is uncertain. And you look manipulative.” He’s not wrong. He offers five terrific tips to lead through AI disruption as a leader. Great advice!

Hope you enjoyed the kitchen sink for October 16, 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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