NEW YORK – A US judge has ordered two lawyers to pay a $5,000 fine for filing a court brief using the popular artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT that invented a series of non-existent legal precedents.
Judge Kevin Castel considered that the lawyer Steven Schwartz and his partner Peter LoDuca “knowingly ignored” the signals that the cases that ChatGPT had included were false, and that they offered “misleading” statements to the court, reason why he considers that they acted in bad faith
The magistrate considered that although there is “nothing inherently improper in the use of a reliable artificial intelligence tool as an assistant”, the regulations “impose a control function on lawyers to guarantee the accuracy of their statements”.
The ruling also underlines that both “abandoned responsibilities when they submitted the non-existent court opinions accompanied by false quotes created by the artificial ChatGPT tool and continued to maintain those false opinions after court orders cast doubt on their existence.”
Both were working on a lawsuit against the airline Avianca filed by a passenger who claims he suffered an injury when he was hit with a service cart during a flight.
Schwartz, who was representing the plaintiff, used ChatGPT to write a brief opposing a defense request to have the case dismissed.
In the ten-page document, the lawyer cited several judicial decisions to support his theses, but it was soon discovered that the well-known chatbot from the OpenAI company had invented them.
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“The Court finds itself before an unprecedented situation. A filing submitted by the plaintiff’s attorney in opposition to a motion to dismiss (the case) is replete with citations to non-existent cases,” Judge Kevin Castel wrote at the time.
The lawyer himself presented an affidavit in which he admitted to having used ChatGPT to prepare the brief and acknowledged that the only verification he had carried out was to ask the application if the cases it cited were real.
Schwartz justified himself by assuring that he had never used a tool of this type before and that, therefore, “he was not aware of the possibility that its content could be false.”
The lawyer stressed that he had no intention of misleading the court and fully exonerated another lawyer from the firm who is also exposed to possible sanctions.
