Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Craig Smith, Lecturer in Law, University of Salford

Generative artificial intelligence, which produces original content by drawing on large existing datasets, has been hailed as a revolutionary tool for lawyers. From drafting contracts to summarising case law, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Lexis+ AI promise speed and efficiency.

But the English courts are now seeing a darker side of generative AI. This includes fabricated cases, invented quotations, and misleading citations entering court documents.

As someone who studies how technology and the law interact, I argue it is vital that lawyers are taught how, and how not, to use generative AI. Lawyers need to be able to avoid the risk of sanctions for breaking the rules, but also the development of a legal system that risks deciding questions of justice based on fabricated case law.

On 6 June 2025, the high court handed down a landmark judgment on two separate cases: Frederick Ayinde v The London Borough of Haringey and Hamad Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank QPSC and QNB Capital LLC.

The court reprimanded a pupil barrister (a trainee) and a solicitor after their submissions contained fictitious and inaccurate case law. The judges were clear: “freely available generative artificial intelligence tools… are not capable of conducting reliable legal research”.

As such, the use of unverified AI output can no longer be excused as error or oversight. Lawyers, junior or senior, are fully responsible for what they put before the court.

Hallucinated case law

AI “hallucinations” – the confident generation of non-existent or misattributed information – are well documented. Legal cases are no exception. Research has recently found that hallucination rates range from 58% to 88% in response to specific legal queries, often on precisely the sorts of issues lawyers are asked to resolve.

These errors have now leapt off the screen and into real legal proceedings. In Ayinde, the trainee barrister cited a case that did not exist at all. The erroneous example had been misattributed to a genuine case number from a completely different matter.

In Al-Haroun, a solicitor listed 45 cases provided by his client. Of these, 18 were fictitious and many others irrelevant. The judicial assistant is quoted in the judgment as saying: “The vast majority of the authorities are made up or misunderstood”.

These incidents highlight a profession facing a perfect storm: overstretched practitioners, increasingly powerful but unreliable AI tools, and courts no longer willing to treat errors as mishaps. For the junior legal profession, the consequences are stark.

Many are experimenting with AI out of necessity or curiosity. Without the training to spot hallucinations, though, new lawyers risk reputational damage before their careers have fully begun.

The high court took a disciplinary approach, placing responsibility squarely on the individual and their supervisors. This raises a pressing question. Are junior lawyers being punished too harshly for what is, at least in part, a training and supervision gap?

Education as prevention

Law schools have long taught research methods, ethics, and citation practice. What is new is the need to frame those same skills around generative AI.

While many law schools and universities are either exploring AI within their modules or creating new modules that look at AI, there is a broader shift towards considering how AI is changing the legal sector as a whole.

Students must learn why AI produces hallucinations, how to design prompts responsibly, how to verify outputs against authoritative databases and when using such tools may be inappropriate.

The high court’s insistence on responsibility is justified. The integrity of justice depends on accurate citations and honest advocacy. But the solution cannot rest on sanction alone.

If AI is part of legal practice, then AI training and literacy must be part of legal training. Regulators, professional bodies and universities share a collective duty to ensure that junior lawyers are not left to learn through error or in the most unforgiving of environments, the courtroom.

Similar issues have arisen from non-legal professionals. In a Manchester civil case, a litigant in person admitted relying on ChatGPT to generate legal authorities in support of their argument. The individual returned to court with four citations, one entirely fabricated and three with genuine case names but with fictitious quotations attributed to them.

While the submissions appeared legitimate, closer inspection by opposing counsel revealed the paragraphs did not exist. The judge accepted the litigant had been inadvertently misled by the AI tool and imposed no penalty. This shows both the risks of unverified AI-generated content entering proceedings and the challenges for unrepresented parties in navigating court processes.

The message from Ayinde and Al-Haroun is simple but profound: using GenAI does not reduce a lawyer’s professional duty, it heightens it. For junior lawyers, that duty will arrive on day one. The challenge for legal educators is to prepare students for this reality, embedding AI verification, transparency, and ethical reasoning into the curriculum.

Craig Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘Hallucinated’ cases are affecting lawyers’ careers – they need to be trained to use AI – https://theconversation.com/hallucinated-cases-are-affecting-lawyers-careers-they-need-to-be-trained-to-use-ai-265898

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Cathrine Jansson-Boyd, Professor of Consumer Psychology, Anglia Ruskin University

The Kardashians are back with a new season of their reality series The Kardashians on Disney Plus.

As a researcher of consumer psychology, I have written about consumer neuroscience and how brands and media shape behaviour and self-perception. Watching The Kardashians through that lens reveals more than entertainment. It exposes how luxury and aspiration are woven into identity and sold back to us as self-worth.

The first episode is a materialistic feast. There are close-ups of Dior and Chanel handbags and belts, diamond jewellery and a house sign that reads: “Need money for Birkin.” The Kardashians drive luxury cars, wear designer sunglasses indoors and chat about their Saint Laurent outfits.

Even the camera lingers on the glittering shop windows of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, home to some of the world’s most exclusive designer stores, though no one is actually shopping. If you haven’t seen it, you probably get the idea. In the Kardashian universe, the unspoken motto seems to be: “To have is to be.”

In their world, material possessions are woven into identity and presented as something to aspire to. But is it really all that glamorous?

Overconsumption can lower our wellbeing. Young people, in particular, often turn to excessive consumption to fit in, boost confidence or gain prestige. Teenagers who idolise others for their wealth or possessions are more likely to struggle with their sense of identity later in life.

Research shows that children and adolescents who place strong importance on material possessions often struggle to develop a clear sense of identity. Without learning who they are beyond what they own, they may find it harder to build lasting self-worth and life satisfaction.

Rather than helping us define who we are, possessions can get in the way. They can obscure or distort our sense of self, leading us to equate value with visibility. On top of that, materialism is linked to depression, likely because people often fail to achieve the identity and happiness they hope consumption will bring.

The Kardashian-Jenners have a massive following. Sisters Kylie, Kim and Khloé each have more than 300 million Instagram followers, a clear sign of their influence.

When we admire someone, we naturally compare ourselves to them, a process known as social comparison. It helps us judge where we stand, whether we are better or worse off than others. In this context, owning the same bag, car or outfit becomes a way to measure worth, since possessions often symbolise status and make the buyer feel closer to the celebrity, as if buying into their world.

Social comparison is known to drive materialism. It can start to feel like a competition to “catch up” with those we look up to through conspicuous consumption.

When we fail to keep up with the Kardashians, we may feel inadequate, even if we know deep down we were never in the same race. The Kardashian brand cleverly capitalises on this very idea.

The original series title, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, puns on the human instinct to compare and compete. This dynamic fuels not only the show’s popularity but also its beauty, fashion and lifestyle empires, which invite fans to buy into the brand both literally and symbolically.

You might think the solution is simply to choose better role models, but it is not that straightforward. People often compare themselves to others without realising it, automatically relying on social comparison when processing information about other people. This tendency does not stop at television.

Social media platforms intensify the same dynamic, giving us endless opportunities to measure our worth against curated snapshots of other people’s lives. Research from 2024 shows that heavy exposure to idealised social-media content is associated with increased materialism, lower life satisfaction and greater stress.

Another study found that engagement with influencer content featuring luxury goods can trigger upward social comparison – the tendency to compare ourselves with people we see as better off – leading to feelings of envy and a stronger urge to buy similar products in order to close that gap.

From influencer “unboxings,” where people film themselves opening luxury purchases, to filtered “day in the life” videos, social media users are constantly exposed to lifestyles that appear effortlessly perfect. When we scroll through feeds full of luxury, beauty and success, we can become more materialistic without ever consciously deciding to.

Read more:
Social media: how to protect your mental health

Seeing the extreme wealth of people like the Kardashians surrounded by luxury can spark feelings of envy and relative deprivation, leading to dissatisfaction with our own lives. That dissatisfaction can then trigger compulsive shopping as we try to soothe those uncomfortable emotions and project wealth ourselves.

Unsurprisingly, compulsive buying is closely tied to materialism. If you value possessions and feel envy toward others, you are far more likely to buy impulsively in an attempt to catch up.

Watching glamorous lifestyles where people seem to have it all can be fun escapism, but it also blurs the line between aspiration and insecurity. Shows like The Kardashians offer a fantasy of perfection that few can match, yet they invite us to measure ourselves against it.

In the end, the pursuit of luxury may leave us feeling emptier, not richer. After all, when having becomes being, it is worth asking what is left of the self once the shopping stops.

Cathrine Jansson-Boyd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Keeping up with the Kardashians? Why owning more can leave us feeling less – https://theconversation.com/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-why-owning-more-can-leave-us-feeling-less-268367

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Max Telford, Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, UCL

The next time you go wild swimming, whether in a lake, river or sea, you are probably sharing the water with one of your tiniest, yet closest relatives.

This near-family member is a microscopic, single-celled organism called a choanoflagellate. Scientists are still puzzled by how animals evolved from such simple beginnings. But a new paper describes the discovery of an important new clue.

Choanoflagellates, like most single celled organisms can only survive in water where they live much of their life as a single cell, no more complex than an amoeba.

They are nevertheless more closely related to our own kingdom of life than any other kind of organism is – choanoflagellates are cousins of the animals. Engraved in the structure and function of choanoflagellate cells and written in their DNA code, scientists are finding evidence showing how the very first animals evolved.

Before we get to the new clue, it is worth thinking about what makes animals unique. As I describe in my new book, the simple answer is that, compared to most of the rest of life, animals have large and complicated bodies built from many cells. Your own body contains tens of trillions of cells and even a tiny fruit fly has close to a million.

Our oldest animal ancestor must have evolved a way for its many cells to stick together and form a super-organism from a host of cooperating cells.

The first animals must also have invented ways to produce the many different kinds of cells we have today; muscle cells, nerve cells, egg cells and sperm to name a few. The division of labour among different kinds of cells is one aspect of arguably the biggest invention of the first animals which is embryogenesis.

This is the earliest period of an animal’s life when, starting from a single fertilised egg cell, cell division begins to create all the cells that will make up the animal. These cells then each take on their own specific task and finally the many cells get carefully organised to make a functioning organism.

Scientists are hoping that studying choanoflagellates will help them learn how these skills first evolved.

Choanoflagellates don’t have large, complex bodies and they don’t have embryogenesis. They do, however, have a few animal like qualities. Their cells, for example, can adopt a handful of different shapes with different roles.

Just as our cells can take the form of a nerve or a muscle, theirs can switch from the standard funnel and flagellum form to become amorphous, shape-shifting blobs like an amoeba.

Choanoflagellates can also make tiny multi-celled colonies. In the presence of certain species of bacteria their cells stick together to make little groups of cells called rosettes. The rosettes seem to form because they are better at catching the bacteria (which the choanoflagellates eat) than single cells are.

The rosettes can grow a little, but when they reach a size of about ten cells the bonds between the cells stretch and snap, splitting the rosettes down the middle to form two smaller rosettes of cooperating choanoflagellates.

The resemblance of these rosettes to the earliest stages of an animal embryo seems like a coincidence, however. Unlike an animal embryo, they are not destined to develop into anything else. The new study is about the growth of these rosettes.

In many animals, from mice to flies, there is small group of genes that work together to control how big different organs get – how many cells they contain. Named Hippo, Warts and Yorkie, these genes sound like a mob of gangsters.

They are known collectively as the Hippo pathway. When genes in the Hippo pathway mutate in a growing fly or mouse embryo, the result is flies with huge eyes or newborn mice with monstrous livers.

In adult humans, when Hippo genes mutate, they can produce cancerous growths of uncontrollably dividing cells.

Choanoflagellates have a host of genes in common with animals. Although they don’t have organs like eyes or livers (or embryos or cancer), they do have the genes of the Hippo gang. The new paper first describes how the researchers developed a new technique that lets scientists target any gene in a choanoflagellate so that it can be deliberately mutated.

When the Warts gene was mutated, the rosettes of cells grew twice as large so that they ended up containing 20 cells or more. This uncontrolled growth is strikingly similar to what had been seen in previous studies of flies, mice and some human cancers.

The details of just how the Hippo genes control rosette size are not yet know. But the new work adds to the picture we are building of the single celled precursor of the animals. It is another animal-like characteristic of the choanoflagellates.

If we travelled back in time to meet this tiny beast, we would never mistake it for a member of the animal kingdom. But we would nevertheless find in its repertoire a handful of skills that were going to prove useful in the evolution of animals.

Evolution took the materials that were available – the ability to make different kinds of cells; to stick those cells together; to regulate the number of cells and so on – and tinkered with them. From these beginnings, natural selection would then do its thing, resulting, 600 million years later, in the amazing diversity of the animal kingdom from jellyfish to flies, tapeworms, starfish and you.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Max Telford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How the first animals evolved – a new clue from a tiny relative – https://theconversation.com/how-the-first-animals-evolved-a-new-clue-from-a-tiny-relative-268238

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Meilan Yan, Senior Lecturer in Financial Economics, Loughborough University

Imagine waking up to find your living room underwater for the second time in five years. You try to claim insurance, only to be told your property is now uninsurable. Premiums have tripled. Your mortgage lender is concerned. And your biggest asset, your home, is rapidly losing value.

This isn’t just a personal disaster. It’s a warning sign of a much broader crisis.

The risks associated with climate change are breaking the insurance industry. In the past decade alone, flood frequency has increased fourfold in the tropics and 2.5 times in mid-latitude regions). In the UK, at least one in six people already live with flood risk, heavy-rainfall extremes are increasing, and expected annual damages could rise by 27% by the 2050s.

Insurance claims from extreme weather are surging. The Association of British Insurers (the UK insurance and long-term savings trade body) reports a record £585 million in home weather-damage payouts for 2024.

Climate change is driving more frequent and severe events, pushing traditional insurance models to their limits. Insurers are left with little choice but to raise premiums sharply or withdraw coverage entirely. When insurance becomes unaffordable or unavailable, households are exposed, property values fall, mortgages become harder to secure, and the risk of a wider financial crisis grows.

Ever wondered how to spend or invest your money in ways that actually benefit people and planet? Or are you curious about the connection between insurance and the climate crisis?

Green Your Money is a new series from the business and environment teams at The Conversation exploring how to make money really matter. Practical and accessible insights from financial experts in the know.

Our research into the insurance industry shows that UK resilience is falling behind. Policymakers in the UK tried to avert an insurance crisis by launching Flood Re in 2016, a joint scheme between government and insurers designed to keep insurance affordable for households in high-risk areas. It was meant as a temporary bridge, due to close in 2039 once stronger flood defences and better land-use planning are in place.

But progress has been painfully slow. In January 2024, the House of Commons public accounts committee reported that the government’s £5.2 billion flood defence programme is 40% behind schedule and expected to protect just 200,000 properties by 2027 — far short of its original 336,000 target.

Read more:
Your essential guide to climate finance

By 2025, Flood Re has been under mounting strain. Reinsurance costs had have risen by £100 million in just three years, and policy uptakes have jumped by 20% in a single year – both signs that private insurers were retreating from high-risk markets.

In July 2025, Flood Re’s CEO, Perry Thomas, warned that the UK’s overall flood resilience have worsened since the scheme’s launch, as mortgage lenders, housebuilders, and successive governments have “failed to pull their weight”.

When insurance becomes unaffordable or unavailable, households are left exposed and property values decline, making mortgages harder to obtain. This erosion of coverage threatens the wider financial system: banks rely on insured property as collateral, but without cover, that collateral rapidly loses value.

If the government fails to meet its climate adaptation targets, as many as 3 million UK homes could become effectively worthless within 30 years.

For the banking sector, this creates the risk of homes becoming stranded assets — uninsurable, unmortgageable and falling in value — leading to rising defaults and mounting losses. Unless lenders adopt climate-adjusted risk models that integrate physical hazards such as flooding, storms and heatwaves, they risk underestimating the true exposure of their mortgage portfolios.

If these climate-risk-exposed mortgages are mispriced and then bundled into mortgage-backed securities and sold to investors, the resulting shock could cascade through credit markets – like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, when large volumes of high-risk home loans to borrowers with poor or limited credit histories were repackaged and sold as safe investments. The difference is that this time the crash would be driven by physical climate damage rather than purely financial mismanagement.

A one-way street

Traditional financial crises follow cycles of growth, downturn and recovery, but climate risk moves in only one direction. Rising global temperatures are driving more frequent and severe floods and storms. Without timely adaptation, the damage compounds, eroding property values, undermining insurance and threatening financial stability.

Historical insurance models treated extreme weather as rare “tail risks,” but these events are now more frequent, severe, and interconnected. The tail is becoming “fat,” and shocks ripple across sectors and regions. In short, risk is evolving and insurance frameworks must evolve with it.

Flooding is no longer just an environmental issue. It is a systemic financial threat. Insurers, regulators and lenders must adopt forward-looking models that translate physical climate risks into financial metrics. These models influence market behaviour by shaping how capital is allocated, assets are valued, and risks are priced.

This, in turn, guides investment, planning and adaptation — the process of adjusting systems, infrastructure and practices to withstand and recover from climate impacts.

Effective adaptation measures, such as upgraded flood defences, reduce the future risk of climate-related damage. It’s a feedback loop: better modelling enables smarter adaptation, which in turn strengthens financial stability.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Climate change is becoming an insurance crisis – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-becoming-an-insurance-crisis-260952

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alice Vernon, Lecturer in Creative Writing and 19th-Century Literature, Aberystwyth University

In March 1915, a young British man named Raymond Lodge was deployed to Ypres, France, to fight on the front lines of the first world war. By September, he was dead, aged just 26.

A few weeks later, however, Raymond got in touch with his family. “TELL FATHER I HAVE MET SOME FRIENDS OF HIS”, came the message hastily scrawled in all caps by the spiritualist medium Mrs Osborne Leonard.

Raymond’s father was Sir Oliver Lodge, a prominent physicist whose work helped to develop radio communications. Sir Oliver was also a member of the Society for Psychical Research, an organisation which, among other things, investigated ghosts. The “friends” Raymond had apparently met beyond the grave included F.W.H. Myers, a founding member of the society, who had died in 1901.

Sir Oliver, previously fairly sceptical, was soon drawn into lengthy séances with Mrs Leonard, poring over messages allegedly from Raymond about death and the afterlife. He compiled them into a book entitled Raymond, or Life and Death, which was published in 1916. It proved so popular that it ran to many editions, with soldiers on the front being sent copies by their loved ones.

Spiritualism began in the late 1840s as a pseudo-Christian practice that believed communication with the dead was entirely possible. While it dwindled in popularity at the turn of the century, it was reinvigorated to new levels in the aftermath of the first world war. The popularity of Lodge’s book, moreover, led to dozens of copycat publications, where other soldiers “wrote” of their experiences of the utopian spiritualist afterlife to their families.

Claude’s Book (1919) is one such example, “transcribed” from séances with young Claude by his mother, L. Kelway-Bamber. Kelway-Bamber, having been so heartened by Sir Oliver’s sittings, had hired Mrs Leonard herself to get in touch with her son. Spiritualist mediums were in high demand once more.

Beyond the cynicism

It’s easy to dismiss these séances, even to scoff at them as nothing more than charlatans exploiting public grief, especially from the point of view of modern scepticism. When I was researching my new book, Ghosted: A History of Ghost Hunting and Why We Keep Looking, this was my initial reaction to reading about these bizarre encounters with the spirits of the dead.

But as a sociological phenomenon, borne of mass grief, I think it’s more complicated than that. We may laugh at fraudulent mediums quivering melodramatically as they channel the so-called spirits of the dead, but to discuss spiritualism’s cultural significance requires a more nuanced and sensitive approach.

By the end of the first world war, nearly 9 million soldiers had been killed. General mortality rates were already high prior to the war, and people were no strangers to sudden, unexpected bereavement. But never before had death affected so many people at once, and taken so many young men in the prime of their life.

If we look at spiritualism in the aftermath of the first world war, not to identify fraud and shun its believers as being gullible, we can build up an incredibly detailed picture of why so many clung to séance tables in the hope of contacting their loved ones again.

Everyone’s loss of their son, brother or husband was uniquely painful, and yet these deaths lost their significance when half the families on the street had also lost their young men. Yet, suddenly, everyone knew Raymond Lodge’s name. He stood out among the legions of dead Tommies, because of the séances Sir Oliver held with Mrs Leonard.

This, I think, is why so many grieving families took up spiritualism and wrote their own books – not to piggyback on Raymond’s popularity, but to make their sons, brothers and husbands seem special, too. Moreover, many didn’t know exactly what had happened to soldiers; being able to “speak” to them from beyond the grave made it seem like they were happy and at peace, enjoying themselves in the afterlife, and not in pieces in a muddy ditch thousands of miles from home.

Mary Lodge, Raymond’s mother, sums up the problem with a brief sentence her husband includes in the book: “We can face Christmas now.” We can accuse Mrs Leonard of exploiting grief, but we can’t deny that it eased the suffering of many, regardless of the ethical and moral dilemmas posed by spiritualism.

The history of ghost-hunting and séances is rife with fraud, and scepticism is often required to read around anecdotes to uncover what was really happening, but it’s also a vital resource to help us understand grief and fear of death at certain points in human history. By examining the motivation behind ghost-hunting from a more sympathetic perspective, we can learn a great deal about what it means to be alive.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Alice Vernon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. After the first world war, séances boomed – and dead soldiers ‘wrote’ home – https://theconversation.com/after-the-first-world-war-seances-boomed-and-dead-soldiers-wrote-home-266508