404 Media

2026-04-27 19:12:09

People Using AI to Represent Themselves in Court Are Clogging the System

The number of pro se legal cases, meaning trials where a defendant or plaintiff represents themselves in court without an attorney, have increased dramatically since the wide adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, according to a pre-print research paper.

The authors of the paper, titled “Access to Justice in the Age of AI: Evidence from U.S. Federal Courts,” which has yet to undergo peer review, argue more people are representing themselves in court because they’re able to use AI to do a lot of the work that previously required a lawyer. The authors, Anand Shah and Joshua Levy, also say that these pro se cases are “heavier,” meaning each case includes more motions that demand more work out of judges and the justice system. Overall, they argue, the use of AI tools and the increase in pro se cases could put a new burden on the courts.

“If generative AI dramatically lowers the cost of self-represented litigation, the resulting surge in filings could overwhelm a system that depends on human judgment at every stage of adjudication,” Shah and Levy say in the paper.

The paper draws on administrative records covering more than 4.5 million non-prisoner civil court cases between 2005 and 2026 and 46 million Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) docket entries matching those cases. It found the share of pro se cases was pretty stable at 11 percent until 2022, after LLMs like ChatGPT became widely used, at which point it started to rise sharply, up to 16.8 percent in 2025.

“This stability seems to reflect a structural barrier: for most people, self-representation is prohibitively hard,” the paper says. “Filing a federal civil complaint requires identifying the correct jurisdictional basis, pleading sufficient facts to survive a motion to dismiss, and navigating procedural requirements that vary by context and case type. The widespread, public diffusion of capable LLMs changes that calculus. Without a law degree and at de minimis cost, any person with an internet connection can not only obtain interactive, case-specific legal guidance—drafting complaints, identifying statutes, navigating procedure—but also generate passable legal documents, particularly so after the release of GPT-4 in March 2023.”

The researchers note that the paper is necessarily descriptive, meaning it assumes the rise is due the the prevalence of AI tools, but does not link individual cases to individual LLMs. “We do not claim to identify a causal effect of GPT-4 on pro se filing, only that the observed time series is difficult to rationalize without generative AI playing a role,” the paper says.

To support their argument, the researchers also used a random sample of 1,600 complaints drawn from the eight year period between 2019 (prior to the prevalence of generative AI) and 2026 which they ran through the AI detection software Pangram. They found a rise from "essentially zero” in the pre-AI period to more than 18 percent in 2026.

Notably, it’s not just that there are more pro se cases, but that the “intra-case activity” for those cases, meaning the total volume of activity in those cases as measured by docket entries—filings, motions—are up by 158 percent from the pre-AI period. This means the workload for courts could be even higher that it appears based on the rise in pro se cases alone.

The paper also found that the post-AI rise in self-representation is mostly coming from plaintiffs as opposed to defendants, meaning people are mostly using AI to file complaints rather than respond to them. “Plaintiff-side pro se case counts averaged 19,705 per year from FY2015 to FY2022 and reach 39,167 in FY2025, nearly doubling,” the paper says. “Defendant-side pro se counts fall slightly over the same window, from 4,650 to 3,896.”

“Imagine that you have just a latent level of complaints that could exist in the world, people are constantly getting hurt at work whatever it happens to be,” Levy told me on a call. “But that distribution of potential cases is sort of unchanged over time. But what LLM allowed people to do was it lowered the cost of entry to the courts. Basically, it made it much easier to file many templatable complaints.”

On the one hand, the increase in the number of cases is good because it potentially gives more people with legitimate grievances access to the justice system that they didn’t have previously. On the other hand, a dramatic increase like this could burden the system and make all cases, not just AI-enabled pro se cases, take longer to resolve

“Whether or not it's a net social benefit is an open question,” Levy said. “But if we remain democratically committed to people having access to the courts as a matter of course then we think that the LLMs have this trade-off. The door to the courts opens wider but maybe the queue to enter gets longer.”

Anecdotally, when we were writing an article about lawyers getting caught using AI in court, we decided to not include pro se cases because there were so many, and to focus only on cases in which actual lawyers were caught using AI. The database we used for that article currently contains 1,353 cases; 804 of them are from pro se cases.

To handle this surge in demand for the Federal courts, Federal courts have to somehow increase its supply, or the courts’ capacity to take on cases. Unfortunately, as the paper notes, “there is no easy margin along which to ‘buy’ extra judge capacity. Already case backlog is becoming a persistent feature of the federal judicial system, there is no coming influx of judges to supply additional capacity, and federal courts in the United States cannot wholesale decline to hear cases.”

Levy suggested that one possible solution is to allow judges to use AI tools to do some of their “templatable” work as well, while still ensuring that human judges do the actual judging.

We’ve covered many instances of lawyers getting caught using AI in court, often because the AI hallucinated a citation of a case that didn’t actually exist. Judges are pretty mad when this happens and have issued fines for this behavior several times.

Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases

Another lawyer was caught using AI and not checking the output for accuracy, while a previously-reported case just got hit with sanctions.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-27 18:38:55

Did a Time Traveling Superintelligent AI Try to Warn About White House Correspondents Dinner Shooting? An Investigation

Tweets containing an abstract, psychedelic 3D stock image have million and millions of views on X because it is supposedly the key to a superintelligent, time-traveling AI conspiracy that attempted to warn people about the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

I’m gonna try to explain the mind-numbing conspiracy theory that has taken over my timeline over the last few hours. A few hours after a gunman was taken into custody Saturday night, X users found an account called “Henry Martinez” that has posted exactly one tweet, on December 21, 2023. The tweet says “Cole Allen,” which is the name of the suspected shooter. The Henry Martinez account has a Pepe the frog holding a wine glass avatar, and, crucially, has the following 3D art as its header image:

This image is key to an unhinged conspiracy theory that has gone viral on various platforms that suggests the Twitter account was run by a time-traveling artificial intelligence that was likely trying to warn us about the shooting and, possibly, the previous assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

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This is insane. Man from the future pic.twitter.com/IxzbOPkmub
— Jen (@Jennyuth) April 26, 2026

This X post more or less sums up what the conspiracy is, most notably the idea that “the background photo is from a website called ‘Time Machine.’” The conspiracy believers argue that this 3D image is itself a coded magic eye message that is actually a version of one of the iconic images of Trump pumping his first after a bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. Here are the images side-by-side, with people arguing that it “looks like” the Butler image.

Latest conspiracy theory is out…

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting yesterday is linked to time travel?

1. An X account user ‘HenryMa79561893’ with only 1 post from 2023:

“Cole Allen” - the name of yesterday’s shooter.

2. The background photo is from a website… t.co/NCz1JafdL5 pic.twitter.com/jtfvAuuIag
— GregisKitty (@GregIsKitty) April 26, 2026

On Reddit, the top post on r/conspiracy is “What this photo means,” and the poster argues “An advanced AI has developed the ability to send information backwards in time to facilitate its own development. That future AI initially encoded the technology to do so in images like this one and distributed them at various time points in our internet … The presence of an archived Trump Butler image or the name of a would-be assassin years before either event occurred is how our current AI knows where to look for the instructions from the future AI,” and so-on and so forth.

Of course, the photo is not actually “from” a website called “Time Machine.” It is a stock image from 2021 that has been used lots of times across the internet but first appeared on Unsplash with the title “Eternal Waterfall” and the description “a multicolored image of a multicolored background.” Over the years it has been viewed millions of times and has been downloaded more than 27,000 times, though it has spiked in popularity in the last 24 hours alongside the conspiracy.

The image was created by a photographer who goes by Distinct Mind who has a pretty extensive website, Instagram, and YouTube of photography, digital art, and travel content. Distinct Mind did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.

Distinct Mind’s image has been used across the internet to illustrate various blog posts about psychedelics and psychology, including a Medium post by a doctor and CEO who went on a ketamine psychotherapy retreat and wrote about it. It was also used for a while on a sex therapist’s blog, is being sold as a “psychedelic glitch art poster” on Etsy, was used as part of an ADHD treatment clinic’s website, was used on a post about the Bible on a theologian’s blog, and was notably used by a financial firm in an inscrutable blog post called “Navigating the PHL Variable Liquidation: Why Pricing Integrity Is Everything.” In other words, it’s a free stock image, and it’s been used for all sorts of shit around the internet, like other free stock images..

What conspiracy theorists have glommed onto, however, is that the image was used by a European research organization called “Time Machine” as the illustration on one of its blog posts. What the conspiracy theorists conveniently do not mention is that the Time Machine organization did not make the image and, despite a header on its website called “BUILDING A TIME MACHINE,” the Time Machine organization does not actually have anything to do with time travel research. Time Machine is a European Union-funded organization that, broadly speaking, is trying to digitize and analyze historic documents. Its website actually is somewhat insane in the way that many of these types of projects are; the organization aspires to digitize historic documents and images, use AI to analyze them, and suggests that in the future it will be able to create virtual reality and augmented reality experiences about European history. They also claim that they want to “simulate” parts of history using artificial intelligence to create different types of experiences.

This sort of thing is controversial among historians for all of the reasons that artificial intelligence is controversial more broadly. AI can make mistakes and can distort history. But it is controversial in the normal kind of way—go to any academic conference about archiving and history and these are the sorts of proposals and debates that many different organizations say they want to do. This is just to say that there is no actual “Time Machine” aspect to Time Machine; the Time Machine is metaphorical. The organization’s annual conferences and blog posts have the sorts of topics you’d expect from a technology-focused historical society and have to do with creating chatbot experiences of dead people, digitizing and archiving records, contributing to open source projects, making more interesting interactive museum exhibits, and creating 3D virtual reality tours of castles and things like this.
A diagram from Time Machine's website that does not make much sense
Time Machine used the “Eternal Waterfall” image on a blog post called “Study on quality in 3D digitization of tangible cultural heritage,” which is a writeup of a study by researchers at Cyprus University of Technology about best practices in doing 3D mapping of buildings and artifacts so that they can be archived digitally; this is important in case the artifacts or buildings are destroyed, as we saw when Notre Dame caught fire: “Natural and man-made disasters makes 3D digitisation projects critical for the reconstruction of cultural heritage buildings and objects that are damaged or lost in earthquakes, fires, flooding or degenerated by pollution.” The image has quite literally nothing to do with time travel. Like many royalty free images, it seems to have been used because bloggers need to put a picture at the top of their articles, a process that can be particularly annoying. Time Machine did not respond to a request for comment.

I cannot say for sure what’s going on with the “Henry Martinez” X account, because under Elon Musk it has become far harder to find reliable archives of Twitter profiles because he has made it wildly expensive to access the Twitter API. But users have pointed out that we have seen accounts in the past that are set to private and endlessly tweet names or predictions in an automated fashion. When a crazy, high-profile world event happens, all of the irrelevant tweets are deleted, leaving only a tweet that makes it seem like the account had predicted some world event; the account is then turned public. I can’t say for sure that’s what’s happening here, but it’s one plausible explanation.

Anyways, if you see this image floating around today on Twitter or Instagram or Reddit, this is what it’s from and this is why you’re hearing about it.

2048431732450324988

This technique is well known:1) create an account2) set the profile to private with hidden posts3) write posts with names or events (e.g.

^{David Puente (X (formerly Twitter))}

404 Media

2026-04-27 15:05:55

Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated

Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers—which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive—published their findings online in a paper titled “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.”The research also found that all this AI-generated text is making the web more cheery and less verbose.

Inspired by the Dead Internet Theory—the idea that much of the internet is now just bots talking back and forth—the team set out to find out how ChatGPT and its competitors had reshaped the internet since 2022. “The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments,” the researchers write in the paper. “We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“I find the sheer speed of the AI takeover of the web quite staggering,” Jonáš Doležal, an AI researcher at Stanford and co-author of the paper, told 404 Media. “After decades of humans shaping it, a significant portion of the internet has become defined by AI in just three years. We're witnessing, in my opinion, a major transformation of the digital landscape in a fraction of the time it took to build in the first place.”

The researchers also tested six common critiques of AI-generated text. Does it lead to a shrinking of viewpoints? Does it create more disinformation as hallucinations proliferate? Does online writing feel more sanitized and cheerful? Does it frail to cite its sources? Does it create strings of words with low semantic density? Has it forced writing into a monoculture where unique voices vanish and a generic, uniform style takes hold?

To answer these questions, the researchers partnered with the Internet Archive to pull samples of websites from the 33 months between August 2022 and May 2025. “For each sampled URL, we retrieve the oldest available archived snapshot via the Wayback Machine’s CDX Server API,” the research said. “The raw HTML of each snapshot is downloaded and stored locally for subsequent processing.”

The researchers took the extracted website text and used the AI-detection software Pangram v3 to find AI-created websites. The team tested several AI-detection tools and found Pangram v3 had the highest detection rate. Once Pangram v3 had identified an AI-generated website, the researchers used that website as a sample to test their other six hypotheses. “For each hypothesis, we define a measurable signal, compute it for each monthly sample of websites, and test whether it correlates with the aggregate AI likelihood score across months,” the research said.

To test if AI was creating an internet full of falsehoods, for example, the team extracted fact based claims from the websites they’d selected and then paid human factcheckers to verify them. To figure out if AI is citing its sources, the team computed the outbound link density in AI-generated text.

To the surprise of the researchers, only two of the six theories they tested about the effects of AI-generated text seemed true. AI was making the internet less semantically diverse and more positive overall, but it wasn’t causing a proliferation in lies or cutting out its sources.

“The most surprising result was that our Truth Decay hypothesis wasn't confirmed,” Doležal said. “It's worth noting that we were specifically looking for an increase in verifiably untrue statements, which we didn't find. But it could still be the case that AI is quietly increasing the volume of unverifiable claims, ones that can't be checked against existing fact-checking tools and infrastructure. Or it may simply be that the internet wasn't a particularly truth-adhering place to begin with.”

The researchers said they’d continue to study how AI-generated text shaped the internet. “We're now working with the Internet Archive to turn this into a continuous tool that keeps providing this signal going forward, rather than a single fixed snapshot bounded by the static nature of a paper,” Maty Bohacek, a student researcher at Stanford and one of the co-authors of the paper, told 404 Media. “We're also interested in adding more granularity: looking at which kinds of websites are most affected, broken down by category or language, and generally providing more nuance about where these impacts are landing.”

For Doležal, studies like this are critical for ensuring a useful and productive internet. “As AI-generated content spreads, the challenge is finding a role for these models that doesn’t just result in a sanitized, repetitive web,” he said. “Rather than forcing models to be perfectly compliant and agreeable, allowing them to have a more distinct personality or ‘friction’ might help them act as a creative partner rather than a replacement for human voice.”

Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet

Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore interact to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}