In 1998, government lawyer Stephen Houck made a novel argument. Asked why the U.S. wasn’t summoning Bill Gates to testify in its antitrust case against Microsoft, Houck said, “Because we have his email.” The New York Times called it “the first major email trial,” in which messages that were voluminous, discoverable, and “alive with ideas and competitive zeal, punctuated with profanity and exclamation points” featured heavily. Soon, there were widespread official policies — not always heeded — about what could or should be said in messages written on the computer.

In 2005, a computer consultant was convicted of killing his wife after prosecutors presented a search history that included terms like “neck,” “snap,” and “break.” In the press, it was dubbed the “Google Murder” — like the “email trial,” a harbinger of countless legal proceedings and news stories that would surface digital communications that were mistaken for private.

Now, interactions with AI are finding their way into the public record. 404 Media reports:

An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes used ChatGPT to write significant portions of his “expert report.” [His prompts] showed that he asked ChatGPT to........

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