The Weekly Mutiny #6: Ninety Seconds, 350 Pages, and an Empty Checkbox
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The Weekly Mutiny #6: Ninety Seconds, 350 Pages, and an Empty Checkbox
August 24, 2026
Three stories this week, and each one turns on a document the institution wrote about itself. A bid waiver in a city council record. A stack of chatbot prompts surfaced in discovery. A state form with a box nobody checked. None of it was hidden. Someone just had to pull the file.
3M's expert witness asked ChatGPT to write his report, and the prompts are now in the court record. In the $61 million lawsuit over the 2020 Watson Grinding explosion in Houston, which killed three people and damaged 200 homes, 3M paid Knighthawk Engineering roughly $90,000 for an expert analysis. Discovery produced 350 pages of records showing the expert fed ChatGPT hundreds of court documents and prompted it to "show how 3M is 0% at fault," a finding first reported by 404 Media. The strangest detail is who caught the problem: when he asked the chatbot to review its own draft as opposing counsel, it warned him that claiming zero responsibility would make him look like an advocate rather than an expert, and the phrase disappeared from the filed report. Our report on the discovery record.
Columbus approved its Flock contract in under 90 seconds. Undoing it is taking six-hour hearings. Ordinance 2965-2024 waived competitive bidding for the camera network, on the stated logic that surrounding central Ohio agencies already ran Flock, so interoperability required buying Flock too. By one local outlet's review of the December 2024 meeting video, the ordinance was read, explained, and passed in about 85 seconds with no questions from council. The August 10 hearing that followed a police audit, which found more than 15,000 searches potentially tied to immigration enforcement, ran nearly six hours, drew overwhelmingly negative comment from 55 residents, and ended with petitions carrying more than 600 signatures. The renewal fight lands in December. How the network was approved, from the council record.
New York asked more than 160 companies if AI took the jobs. Not one said yes. Friday's Black Box read a year of New York mass-layoff filings against the checkbox the state added in March 2025 asking whether automation contributed to the cuts. The box came by directive rather than statute, carries no penalty, and has no published definition of what counts, and across more than 160 filings it was never checked once. The tell is in Albany: one pending bill would replace the checkbox with statutory notice, a public violator registry, and a $10,000 daily penalty for willful violations, which is not the legislation you write for a disclosure that is working. (Corrected October 10, 2026: a second bill, requiring annual AI workforce reports, passed both houses in June 2026 and awaits the governor.) The Black Box 004, with the full source list.
Friday's issue is The Black Box 006: twelve million searches from Flock's own audit logs, obtained through public records, and why the company is quietly rebuilding the audit system it says was working.