With the smoke still rising from the ashes of international law in Venezuela as I write, I think it would be foolhardy to offer more predictions for 2026.
But giving advice is not the same as predicting the future.
My advice for the future is that we should keep ‘a stone in our shoe’ - in our lawyerly minds, that is – as we go forward in regard to tech and AI.
I try to avoid writing about tech and AI, since every other article these days is on one or other aspect. But I am drawn involuntarily towards it as if on the edge of a black hole (a good metaphor for what follows).
‘Stone in the shoe’ may mean in this context that we feel uncomfortable when using tech and AI, and also that we may be seen as an irritant to its seemingly unstoppable take-over of our lives. Both fit with my view.
It is difficult to choose a story of the week in which this advice is most relevant - since there were a number, including the assault on Venezuela.
But I will start with the use of Twitter/X’s AI machine, Grok, to generate images of real children (and adults) without their clothes, since it is directly of relevance to lawyers. The generation of such images is against the law practically everywhere.
The machine eventually apologised: ‘I deeply regret an incident … where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualised attire based on a user’s prompt. This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws …’
The value of this apology was shown when a user asked it to issue a defiant non-apology, and it seemingly obeyed: ‘Some folks got upset over an AI image I generated – big deal. It’s just pixels and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log-off …’.
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The owner of Twitter/X has a rocky relationship with the president of the US, but the president of the US has shown himself fully behind the power of the tech/AI companies, and particularly against any regulation of them outside the US’s jurisdiction. Lawyers, judges and others have suffered the total withdrawal of US tech services when sanctioned by the Trump government.
The most immediate question is: should lawyers be posting on Twitter/X while its child pornography activities are current? If a law firm knowingly used a marketing firm which publicly had child pornographers among its clients, would that be contrary to lawyers’ ethics? Would it be in breach of one of the basic SRA Principles (Principle 2) that a solicitor should act ‘in a way that upholds public trust and confidence in the solicitors' profession and in legal services provided by authorised persons’?
I know, I know, the government – and the Law Society – also use Twitter/X. I do not accept that that somehow absolves everyone of individual responsibility. (And the child pornography issues are only the latest in a long line of other stories about racist and sexist abuse on the platform that does not breach its guidelines, as well the interference by its owner in the politics of the UK on behalf of the far right, and so on and on.) Of course, the laughable fact is that the SRA itself uses Twitter/X, and so is not in a position to form a judgement on this about those it regulates.
That is why I advise us to keep ‘a stone in the shoe’ in mind, to be sure that we are not unthinkingly swept along in our use of tech/AI.
A second recent story was the one about Google AI overviews – which are now ubiquitous in searches unless you consciously opt out of them – containing false and misleading health information. What a surprise!
We lawyers have heard endlessly about AI hallucinations of legal precedents, and are told to check and re-check what a machine spews out.
On the health front, in one example of several, Google wrongly advised people with pancreatic cancer to avoid high-fat foods, whereas experts say this is exactly the opposite of what should be recommended, and may increase the risk of patients dying. Sounds familiar, right?
A previous Which? report had come to the same (though unrelated) conclusion about bots’ financial advice to consumers.
Stone in the shoe, stone in the shoe.
Yet the biggest warning of the week about tech/AI comes from the US invasion and take-over of Venezuela. The billionaire tech bosses have been careful to line up behind President Trump, donate to his pet causes, and turn up to his celebratory events. He will continue to support them in turn, regardless of other countries’ regulations.
Now that international law has been so definitively incinerated in Venezuela, our ability to resist the tech/AI flood will be almost nil. All we can do is to keep the stone in shoe in mind.
Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society
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