Almost all sources invented: 10,000 dollar fine for US lawyer after AI use
A lawyer in California has to pay a fine because he submitted a petition to the court full of false references. He is not really understanding.
(Image: Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock.com)
A lawyer in California has been fined USD 10,000 because one of his court filings was full of false source information generated by an AI. The news portal CalMatters reports this and adds that it is the highest fine imposed on a single lawyer in the US state for such an offense. According to the court, 21 of the 23 citations listed by the lawyer were fictitious. He in turn admitted that he had not read the generated text before submitting it to the court. ChatGPT was only supposed to improve his original text. He had not known that the technology would make things up.
AI in court: an ever-increasing problem
According to CalMatters, the incident occurred in the summer of 2023, a few weeks after the ChatGPT company OpenAI declared that its AI model could even pass a final legal examination. The lawyer had asserted that he had written his appeal application himself but then wanted to improve it with the help of ChatGPT. Although this is now costing him dearly, he believes it is unrealistic to expect lawyers not to use AI. The technology has long been an important tool, but care should be taken when using it. The fine has now been imposed for a frivolous appeal, breaches of court rules, citing the wrong cases, and wasting time and taxpayers' money, CalMatters quotes.
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The case finally decided by an appeals court is far from the first in which AI has caused problems in a court of law. Hundreds of incidents in which AI technology was responsible for fictitious references in court documents have already been compiled as part of two different projects. The news portal quotes legal expert Mark McKenna from the University of California, Los Angeles, as saying that universities and law firms are partly to blame because they are bombarded with requests to use AI without really thinking about it. He therefore believes that the issue will only get worse before things start to improve.
(mho)
