Lawyer Embarrassed by AI: ChatGPT Generates Fabricated Cases for Civil Lawsuit

A New York lawyer who used ChatGPT to prepare for a civil lawsuit apologized in court because the artificial intelligence program had tipped him off with fabricated cases. “I simply had no idea ChatGPT was capable of fabricating entire quotes of cases or legal opinions, in a way that seemed authentic,” attorney Steven Schwartz wrote in a document released this week to the case.

In this case – the real one – the lawyer represents before a federal civil court in Manhattan a client who is attacking the Colombian airline Avianca. Roberto Mata seeks compensation because he claims to have been injured in the leg by the fall of a metal plate, during a flight in August 2019, from El Salvador to New York. The airline asked the court to dismiss the case, but the passenger’s attorney filed a brief citing more than half a dozen court precedents to support his arguments. These included cases titled “Petersen v Iran Air”, “Varghese v China Southern Airlines” or “Shaboon v Egyptair”. Problem, neither the opposing party, nor Judge Castel, have found any trace of it in the case law.

“Six of the submitted cases appear to be false court decisions with false citations,” the judge found in writing. Steven Schwartz had to admit that ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence tool created by OpenAI, made it all up. In his mea culpa written when the judge summoned him for possible sanctions, the lawyer assures that he did not want to mislead the court. “At the time I did the legal research in this case, I thought ChatGPT was a reliable search engine. I now know that was not the case,” he said. Promising not to do it again, he added that the affair had covered his cabinet with ridicule, since the publication of a first article in the New York Times.

Symbol of the new prowess of artificial intelligence, the conversational robot ChatGPT, created by the company Open AI, has experienced dazzling success in recent months thanks to its ability to generate content close to what humans can create, such as poems or essays. But it also arouses an avalanche of fears: disinformation, manipulation of elections, massive destruction of jobs and even a threat to humanity.