How to ticket a Waymo
A small newsletter on legaltech
AI
Sen. Chuck Grassley, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has sent letters to two federal judges to request information about their purposed use of GenAI for orders that included errors and fabrications [Law360 ($) | Mississippi Today | Press Release | Letter to Judge Henry T. Wingate | Letter to Judge Julien Xavier Neals ]
Why do some attorneys turn to cheaper GenAI products instead of the expensive legal-specific ones?
Self-represented litigants are starting to see success in court using GenAI tools to help them with their cases
Deloitte has to partially refund the Australian government over a report the firm wrote that was found to have errors that appear to arise from AI hallucinations
The debate on how much exposure parents should allow small children to interact with GenAI products
From The Conversation: “What past education technology failures can teach us about the future of AI in schools”
Following an AI-generated psych-rock band named The Velvet Sundown gaining close to a million Spotify listens this summer, an AI-generated singer has made it onto the Billboard charts for R&B Digital Song sales and reached overall Digital Song sales
OpenAI has had to revise some of its policies for the image generation app Sora, after complaints about the possibility of creating offensive or threatening deepfakes, as well as pushback from rightholders
The US Patent and Trademark Office is launching an Artificial Intelligence Search Automated Pilot (ASAP!) Program that will perform “pre-examination prior art searches”
Fabrication Follies
Data Privacy
Repercussions of the Discord hack continue to roll out for the company and its users [ The 420 | 404 Media ($)]
From CalMatters: “[California Gov.] Newsom just vetoed a bill to regulate license plate readers — even as fresh evidence of misuse emerges
From 404 Media [$]: “New leaked documents show how the FBI convinced a judge to let its partners collect a mass of encrypted messages from thousands of phones around the world”
Miscellaneous
Police in a SF Bay Area city pulled a Waymo driveless taxi for making an illegal U-turn, but since there was no one operating the car, there was no one to ticket
Long Reads
“Ghost Workers in the AI Machine: U.S. Data Workers Speak Out About Big Tech’s Exploitation,” https://cwa-union.org/ghost-workers-ai-machine
Beger, Claas, Ryan Yi, Shuhao Fu, Arseny Moskvichev, Sarah W. Tsai, Sivasankaran Rajamanickam, and Melanie Mitchell. "Do AI Models Perform Human-like Abstract Reasoning Across Modalities?." arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.02125 (2025) [Summary]