Skip to main content

A lawyer used ChatGPT for legal filing. The chatbot cited nonexistent cases it just made up

ChatGPT lawyer

Lawyer Steven Schwartz of Levidow, Levidow & Oberman has been practicing law for three decades. Now, one case can completely derail his entire career.

Why? He relied on ChatGPT in his legal filings and the AI chatbot completely manufactured previous cases, which Schwartz cited, out of thin air.

It all starts with the case in question, Mata v. Avianca. According to the New York Times, an Avianca customer named Roberto Mata was suing the airline after a serving cart injured his knee during a flight. Avianca attempted to get a judge to dismiss the case. In response, Mata's lawyers objected and submitted a brief filled with a slew of similar court decisions in the past. And that's where ChatGPT came in.

SEE ALSO: ChatGPT plugins face 'prompt injection' risk from third-parties

Schwartz, Mata's lawyer who filed the case in state court and then provided legal research once it was transferred to Manhattan federal court, said he used OpenAI's popular chatbot in order to "supplement" his own findings.

ChatGPT provided Schwartz with multiple names of similar cases: Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, Shaboon v. Egyptair, Petersen v. Iran Air, Martinez v. Delta Airlines, Estate of Durden v. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and Miller v. United Airlines.

The problem? ChatGPT completely made up all those cases. They do not exist.

Avianca's legal team and the judge assigned to this case soon realized they could not locate any of these court decisions. This led to Schwartz explaining what happened in an affidavit on Thursday. The lawyer had referred to ChatGPT for help with his filing.

According to Schwartz, he was "unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.” The lawyer even provided screenshots to the judge of his interactions with ChatGPT, asking the AI chatbot if one of the cases were real. ChatGPT responded that it was. It even confirmed that the cases could be found in "reputable legal databases." Again, none of them could be found because the cases were all created by the chatbot.

It's important to note that ChatGPT, like all AI chatbots, is a language model trained to follow instructions and provide a user with a response to their prompt. That means, if a user asks ChatGPT for information, it could give that user exactly what they're looking for, even if it's not factual. 

The judge has ordered a hearing next month to "discuss potential sanctions" for Schwartz in response to this “unprecedented circumstance." That circumstance again being a lawyer filing a legal brief using fake court decisions and citations provided to him by ChatGPT.



from Mashable https://ift.tt/zpARgC0
https://ift.tt/KOoa8uq
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Shortcut AI Excel agent could one-shot spreadsheet jobs. Heres how to try it.

There's a new AI agent on the block for people who spend their waking hours inside spreadsheets. Navigate to Shortcut AI's website , and you'll find a page that looks almost exactly like an empty Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The main difference is a sidebar chatbot that can be tasked with taking on the tedious legwork of building, say, complex financial models or competitive analyses. Because Shortcut is agentic , meaning it can handle multi-step tasks on the user's behalf, the tool can do more than just generate Excel formulas or analyze spreadsheet data. In a demo on X, Nico Christie, founder and CEO of the Shortcut AI agent, showed how the tool swapped out the data from a Microsoft distributed cash flow analysis (DCF) for Google data by looking up Google's SEC filings and populating the data in the same template. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Shortcut launched on Monday with a rather ominous tagline: "Try...
Post a Comment
Read more

When the clocks change for Daylight Saving Time, and why we do it at all

The clocks on our smartphones do something bizarre twice a year: One day in the spring, they jump ahead an hour, and our alarms go off an hour sooner. We wake up bleary-eyed and confused until we remember what just happened. Afterward, "Daylight Saving Time" becomes the norm for about eight months (And yes, it's called "Daylight Saving" not "Daylight Savings." I don't make the rules). Then, in the fall, the opposite happens. Our clocks set themselves back an hour, and we wake up refreshed, if a little uneasy.  Mild chaos ensues at both annual clock changes. What feels like an abrupt and drastic lengthening or shortening of the day causes time itself to seem fictional. Babies and dogs demand that their old sleep and feeding habits remain unchanged. And more consequential effects — for better or worse — may be involved as well (more on which in a minute). Changing our clocks is an all-out attack on our perception of time as an immutable law of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mystery Pixel smartphones detailed in code references

The devices also pack 12GB of RAM apiece. Shiba is said to feature a screen with a resolution of 2,268 x 1,080 pixels while Husky could be a bit larger at 2,822 x 1,344 pixels. Given the amount of RAM, however, both would likely qualify as premium devices. from TechSpot https://ift.tt/cefMDJW via
Post a Comment
Read more