Chain Link An account purporting to represent a law firm has been caught sending out ominous threats — but upon closer inspection, it appears that the “firm” doesn’t exist, nor does its lawyers. As 404 Media reports, this seeming AI scam began when Ernie Smith, the owner of the blog Tedium, got a “copyright infringement notice” from someone named Will Thomas claiming to represent Commonwealth Legal, an allegedly Arizona-based law firm. “We’re reaching out on behalf of the Intellectual Property division of a notable entity,” the email read, “in relation to an image connected to our client.” Generally speaking, these kinds of notices are an ultimatum: take down our copyrighted material or we’ll sue you. But in Smith’s case, the firm in question wasn’t asking for an image takedown, but was instead requesting that Tedium link the purportedly-copyrighted image, which came from the royalty-free image database Unsplash, back to some sort of gadget review site called Tech4Gods. As you can probably guess from the use of terms like “purporting,” “claiming,” and “allegedly,” nothing about this situation was legit. Perhaps the most damning indictment of the phony firm, besides the fact that none of its so-called “lawyers” turned up any results on LinkedIn or their respective alleged universities, is that a reverse image search linked them to a site called generated.photos — the same source as the fake writers we found at Sports Illustrated last year. “All of the faces scanned were likely AI generated, most likely by a Generative Adversarial Network…Someone’s Sending Out Legal Threats From Fake, AI-Generated “Lawyers”