asked a room full of lawyers at ABA TechShow how many had encountered deep fake evidence in litigation. Not one hand went up.

Is the deep fake threat a problem in search of a problem? Or are we in the same place we were with AI hallucinations before the first fake citation showed up in a courtroom and we just don’t know it yet?

I co-presented on this with Judge Xavier Rodriguez, one of the sharper judicial minds on technology in the federal judiciary. His observation: we have a built-in presumption of validity for photos, recordings, and video. Maybe our skepticism hasn’t caught up with what AI can now produce.

My post for Above the Law.

60 Minutes, the CBS weekly news show, did a segment this past Sunday on the powers of so-called deepfakes. Deepfakes refers to the use of AI to alter how a person looks or sounds on video. It can also be used to make one person appear to be and sound like another.

According to Wikipedia. Deepfakes (a combination of “deep learning” and “fake”) are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image on a video is simply replaced with someone else’s likeness. Deepfakes use machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate both visual and audio content.

Continue Reading Deepfakes and the Litigation Risk

Here’s a scenario could become routine: You’re in trial, opposing counsel shows a video that’s damaging to your client, but your gut says something’s not quite right. What do you do? How should the Court approach it?

There’s a good new University of Colorado study on deepfakes and video evidence. Even though we talk about it a lot, I’m not sure we are ready for what may be coming.

Here’s my post for Above the Law.

Back in the 1970s, there was a television commercial featuring jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald with a wine glass, a recording studio, and a recordable audio cassette made by a company called Memorex. The pitch was that the audio recording of Ella’s voice could break the wine glass, just like her live voice. The tagline was, “Is it live or Memorex?”

Avocado teapots. Cats playing chess. How new technology mandates a level of judicial technological competence and understanding. 

Bluntly put, judges exist to serve litigants who have disputes. The business of the judiciary is to facilitate the resolution of disputes–whether the dispute is resolved by the judge, a jury or through settlement. Judges are in a service business: like every other service business these days, judges need some basic familiarity and understanding of relevant technology.

.A new technology caught my eye last week that drives this point home. DALL-E, a technology that lets you create digital images by typing in what you want to see, was discussed in a recent New York Times article by Cade Metz. The technology was developed by an outfit called OpenAI, which is backed by a billion dollars in funding from Microsoft. According to OpenAI, DALL-E is “trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs”. It is a “new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”

Continue Reading To Serve Their Customers, Judges Need To Understand Technology

AI wearables were everywhere at CES 2026. Smart glasses that whisper answers in your ear, AI enabled contact lenses, AI necklaces. They see what you see and hear what you hear. Impressive tech, but what happens when a witness testifies while wearing smart glasses feeding them answers? How do we handle discovery demands for everything someone’s wearables recorded? Who’s liable when the AI whispers wrong advice in a critical moment?

We’re still scrambling to deal with deepfakes. We better add wearables to our list of AI challenges.

Here’s my post on these issues for Above the Law.