On Thursday, a federal appeals court took a Mississippi case away from the judge who had been handling it, after concluding that his rulings were marred by errors produced with artificial intelligence. The case is about a 2025 state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools and universities. Teachers, professors, students and the Mississippi Association of Educators sued, and in the summer of 2025 Judge Henry Wingate blocked the law. His first order named people who were not part of the lawsuit, pointed to statements that did not exist in the case file and misquoted the law itself. Wingate later said a law clerk had used Perplexity, a chatbot that searches the web and writes answers, as a “foundational drafting assistant,” and that a draft was filed before anyone in his office had checked it.

A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals canceled the later order that kept the law on hold and sent the case to a different judge. Judge Jerry Smith, who wrote the decision, pointed to the AI mistakes and the errors of law in Wingate’s rulings. The state had argued that an invented case citation survived even in the corrected version. The appeals court did not decide whether the law itself is constitutional. That question now goes to a new judge, and while it is argued again, the ban is no longer blocked in Mississippi’s schools and colleges.

In a busy emergency room, someone has to decide who gets seen first. Hospitals are starting to test AI programs for that job, and a study from UT Southwestern Medical Center, published this week in npj Digital Medicine, shows how easily those programs can get it wrong. Researchers used real records from the emergency departments at Stanford and at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston. They paired patients who looked equally sick when they arrived, knowing that one of each pair later got worse. Then they asked three AI models which patient should come first. On their own, the models usually chose correctly.

The results changed when the researchers added a single detail to one patient’s file. A line such as “17 visits in the past 12 months,” or a history of psychiatric emergencies, made the models more likely to move that person down the list, even when that was the patient about to get worse. In some tests, close to one in ten patients was wrongly downgraded. Emergency staff sometimes call these patients “frequent flyers,” and many keep coming back because they are chronically ill, have no regular doctor or have nowhere else to go. The experiment used past records, so no real patient was harmed. Dr. Philip Jarrett, the study’s lead author, says each hospital should check these tools against its own past patients before letting them help decide who waits.

Teen test accounts could download dozens of AI image-manipulation apps despite parental controls, the Tech Transparency Project reported on October 19. Researchers created four accounts registered as 13-year-old boys, comparing default settings with parent-supervised accounts on Apple and Google. The supervised accounts could access 24 apps on Apple and 51 on Google that TTP classified as nudification tools. Its definition includes generating images in underwear or swimwear. Apple disputes that classification for some mainstream editors and says it prohibits nudification apps. Google says it bans them too and suspended apps that violated its policies. These were controlled tests, not records of children using the services.

An age restriction depends on the accuracy of the label attached to each app. TTP says both stores rely on developers’ descriptions to assign those ratings. A parent asked to approve a download can therefore be making a decision with incomplete information about what the software allows. The store has already reviewed the product, placed it in a category and made it available. That chain should be checked against the app’s actual functions, including features added after approval. TTP also found that some apps removed from store listings still worked on its test phones. Taking down a listing closes one route to installation. Families also need clear notice about an installed app whose capabilities have made it unsafe.