In the long-running tension between creative authorship and artificial intelligence, the machinery of justice itself has come under examination. A federal magistrate judge presiding over landmark copyright suits against OpenAI and Microsoft disclosed that she held Microsoft stock during the proceedings — a financial entanglement that judicial ethics ordinarily forbids. Judge Ona T. Wang concluded that her voluntary divestment of those holdings rendered recusal unnecessary, but the disclosure has opened a quieter question beneath the legal one: whether the appearance of impartiality, once distu