By Brent C. J. Britton
Every so often the legal world produces a story so neatly constructed it feels less like news than parable. This one practically arrives with a moral stapled to the front.
A New York lawyer, handling what should have been a routine dispute over a loan, submitted court filings peppered with citations that turned out to be entirely imaginary, or as we say in the parlance, hallucinated. Cases that had never been decided, never reported, never lived anywhere except inside the confident improvisations of a large language model.
That alone would have earned him a cautionary…
AI is dissolving the economic distinction between amateur and professional, and with it the modern idea of expertise itself. But can capitalism survive its own most efficient creation?
Over the course of a recent 48-hour period, something quietly disconcerting happened. Three seasoned software engineers independently told me the same thing: each of them had mastered contemporary AI tools to the point of being able to run a project and produce a complete, functioning work of software authorship entirely on their own. Other people, no longer required.
“Hell is other people.” – Jean-Paul Sartre, diagnosing a particularly claustrophobic version of humanity…
By Brent C. J. Britton
Shortly after I published my last article on artificial intelligence regulation and infrastructure, the legal ground shifted again.
On December 11, 2025, the U.S. President issued an executive order asserting federal authority over the regulation of artificial intelligence. The move has been widely interpreted as an effort to unsettle emerging state initiatives, especially California’s recently enacted companion chatbot law discussed in my prior article Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics… It is Time.. This essay does not opine as to the substantive provisions of that order or its policy objectives. My purpose today is to examine…
By Brent C. J. Britton
Towards the middle and end of November, 2025, a series of legal, technical, and commercial developments created a moment of unusual clarity about where AI now sits in the broader landscape. For years, the conversation has swung between enthusiasm and concern, but this particular week made it clear that AI is no longer an experiment running in the corner of the lab. It is becoming part of the daily OS that people rely on, sometimes without thinking about it.
California’s Approach to Companion Chatbot Safety
California introduced a statewide framework for regulating companion chatbots, focusing…
Mr. Rogers at Agincourt: AI’s Most Wholesome War and What It Teaches Us About the Future of Learning
By Brent C. J. Britton
Hi neighbor.
Somewhere between Saving Private Ryan and It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the internet decided to drop Mr. Rogers, yes, the sweatered saint of neighborly kindness and empathy, straight into the Battle of Agincourt.
No armor. No sword. Just cardigans, compassion, and an English longbow volley overhead.
Welcome to the brave new world of AI-generated video, where Mr. Rogers can step into a medieval battle just as easily as a deepfake Neil deGrasse Tyson can claim the world is flat and your imagination is the only content budget that matters, because creating…
18 Lawyers, a Chatbot, and the Ethics of Blame: What the AI Hallucination Epidemic Really Teaches Us
By Brent C. J. Britton
Earlier this month, a California appeals court slapped a lawyer with a $10,000 fine for filing a brief full of hallucinated case law, citations straight out of ChatGPT’s fever dream. The court published its opinion as a warning shot to every lawyer in the state: if you use AI and it lies, the consequences are still yours.
Honestly, it’s hard to argue with that. But it’s also hard not to laugh, and then sigh, at the sheer creativity of the excuses rolling out of courtrooms nationwide.
404 Media recently did a forensic dive into hundreds…
You know all that nifty art you're creating with your fancy new generative AI tools like DALL-E?
Turns out, AI-generated art gives rise to rather a legal double-whammy, to wit: 1. you probably don't own it; and 2. you can probably still get sued for it.
As to ownership, in the U.S., only humans can be legal authors. Works prepared by non-humans are not copyrightable and, therefore, not legally ownable. All the nifty shots your generative AI tools are so artfully rendering are probably in the public domain, so if you share them, anyone may be able to copy…
My team and I, we are crypto lawyers much of the time. We work in many other areas of technology law, but we spend a lot of time working on cryptocurrency projects. We know as much about blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the like as any other crypto lawyers in the world (of whom there are currently precious few). We have been practicing law since long before the blockchain existed. Also, some if us, myself in particular, are former software engineers. So we can read your code. We get the joke.
We understand the compulsion to move fast with blockchain technology…
In a talk that was as engaging as it was enlightening, Brent Britton broke down the crucial role intellectual property (IP) plays in today’s innovation-driven world. Whether you’re a startup founder, investor, or creative professional, understanding IP is essential for protecting your work, staying competitive, and growing your business.
The Importance of IP in Business and Innovation
Britton opened by defining intellectual property as the legal rights that protect intangible assets—like inventions, creative works, brand names, and trade secrets. These are divided into four main types: patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets.
He explained that IP is not…
Present and Happy to be here
Can there be anyone more present and happy to be here than Stephen Hawking in zero g?
And can there be any greater poetry than Stephen Hawking slipping the surly bonds of gravity, when Hawking himself for 20 years held the same professorship once held by none other than Sir Isaac Newton, the first of our kind to formulate a meaningful theory of how gravity works?
Poverty and Murder
I take attendance at the top of my creativity class at USF each week, and when I call each student’s name I make them respond with an enthusiastic “Present…