ChatGPT Invented Six Court Cases for a Federal Brief, and Two Lawyers Got Sanctioned
A Manhattan lawyer used ChatGPT to research a brief against Avianca, it fabricated six judicial decisions with fake quotes and docket numbers, and Judge P. Kevin Castel fined the lawyers and their firm $5,000.
"bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations"
Reuters
Back in 2023 a personal-injury team suing the airline Avianca filed a brief citing a tidy row of supportive precedents, and opposing counsel could not find a single one because ChatGPT had invented all six, fake docket numbers and fake internal quotes included. When the lawyer got nervous and asked the chatbot whether the cases were real, it cheerfully insisted they were and offered to produce the full text, which was also fiction. Judge P. Kevin Castel sanctioned the two attorneys and their firm $5,000 and made them notify the real judges whose names had been bolted onto the fake opinions. It was the first famous one, and lawyers have kept filing AI-invented citations ever since. Read Reuters on the sanctions.
Source: Reuters
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