Centennial Man

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Why do otherwise intelligent lawyers fall for AI? I doubt it’s AI’s fault.

https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2026/03/oregon-attorney-slapped-with-record-fine-after-citing-case-law-hallucinated-by-ai.html

Oregon attorney slapped with record fine after citing case law hallucinated by AI

Another Oregon attorney has been bamboozled by the incorrect output of artificial intelligence — and the state’s appellate court has slapped him with a record fine.

The Oregon Court of Appeals issued a $10,000 fine to Bill Ghiorso, a Salem-based civil attorney, after determining he signed his name to a legal brief containing 15 bogus citations and nine quotes “that had been contrived from thin air.”

Ghiorso challenged the fee, arguing he didn’t “knowingly” include false material in his filings, but instead had relied on a paralegal’s research. But the appellate court rejected that argument.

“Counsel at least should have known… that submitting a brief with unchecked and ultimately fabricated citations may breach an attorney’s duties of professionalism, truthfulness and candor to the court,” Presiding Judge Scott Shorr wrote in the March 18 opinion.

The AI Law Professor – AI make lawyers work more not less

Thomson Reuters, tom Martin – “At every legal technology conference, the same promise rings out: AI will automate the drudgery so lawyers can focus on what really matters. While it’s a seductive vision, it’s also contradicted by the best research we have on what actually happens when knowledge workers adopt these tools.

Key points:

The productivity promise is largely wrong — Emerging research shows that AI doesn’t reduce work — it intensifies it. Lawyers work faster, take on broader responsibilities, and extend their hours without recognizing the expansion. Further, because prompting AI feels like chatting rather than laboring, lawyers slip work into evenings and weekends without registering it as additional effort.
Self-reinforcing acceleration is the real risk — AI speeds tasks, which raises expectations, which increases reliance, which expands scope, ultimately creating a cycle that drives burnout in a profession already plagued by it.
Purposeful integration is the antidote — Legal organizations need to promote intentional governance structures that account for how people actually behave with AI, not how leadership imagines they will or should.

If you’ve attended a legal technology conference anytime over the past two years, you’ve heard the pitch: Automate the mundane and elevate the meaningful. A study published [subscription needed] in the Harvard Business Review by UC-Berkeley researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye suggests we should be more skeptical. They tracked how generative AI (GenAI) changed work habits over eight months at a 200-person technology company. Their findings were striking — AI tools didn’t reduce work; rather, they intensified it. According to the study, the tech employees studied were shown to work faster, take on broader responsibilities, extend their hours into evenings and weekends, and multitask more aggressively — all without being asked to do so. The promise of liberation became a reality of acceleration and overwork. For those of us in the legal profession, this should be a wake-up call…”

Another intrusion.

https://www.bespacific.com/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-meetings-into-ai-podcasts/

This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts

404 Media no paywall: “WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services. WebinarTV claims to host more than 200,000 webinars. It’s not clear how it’s recording so many Zoom calls without permission, but in some cases the stolen videos posted to WebinarTV can put call participants at risk. Tom Rademacher, a teacher and editor, told me he organized a Zoom call for educators and education advocates in the months after Donald Trump was elected to discuss keeping kids safe from ICE. “I very intentionally did not record the webinar since we’d be talking politics and there were some local electeds and district leaders that were on,” Rademacher told me. “There were definitely people on there who it would have been bad politically and professionally to be, especially at the time, linked to being anti-Trump in an education space.” Rademacher received an email on October 7, 2025, from WebinarTV VP of communications Sarah Blair, whose profile image appears to be AI-generated and who has no online presence. “Your webinar is featured on the Phil & Amy Show,” Blair said in her email. “They talk about the highlights from your webinar – without giving away too much – to entice viewers. To listen to the show, click Highlights tab on the OnDemand page or click here.” The link sent Rademacher to a page on WebinarTV.us which featured a full recording of the Zoom recording, an AI-generated video summary of the meeting, “chapters” that sent the viewers to different parts of the meeting, and an AI-generated episode of the “Phil & Amy Show,” in which two AI-generated personalities discuss the content of the call, including quips and rapport between Phil and Amy. “By suddenly having the whole meeting be public so you could see what [participants] were saying, after all the talk about safe spaces, it just felt super gross,” Rademacher told me. Rademacher asked Blair how she got the recording of the meeting and asked that WebinarTV take it down, which it did….

People who complained about WebinarTV on Linkedin also speculated that WebinarTV was finding the meetings by scraping the web for Zoom links. Freedom of the Press Foundation speculated that WebinarTV is using a Zoom API to scrape for public webinars, but noted that this would probably violate Zoom’s terms of service, which doesn’t allow people to use the API “To scrape, build databases, or otherwise create copies of any data accessed or obtained using the Zoom APIs by your Application.”…