Using ChatGPT, a lawyer fabricates a case and is asked to pay a $5,000 fine

AUS judge penalized the attorney who presented a legal brief that was composed by the AI chatbot ChatGPT and included false quotations and references to nonexistent court rulings.

According to CNBC, US District Judge P. Kevin Castel penalized attorney Steven A. Schwartz $5,000 after he filed a lawsuit against Colombian airline Avianca after mistaking ChatGPT citations for legitimate ones.

In the same case, the court also penalized and punished attorney Peter LoDuca in addition to Schwartz.

Castel claimed that LoDuca and Schwartz “abandoned their responsibilities” when they filed the AI-written brief in their client’s lawsuit against the Avianca airline in March. The report also stated that Castel claimed that the attorneys “continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question.”

He also instructed them to inform each judge who had been mistakenly credited with writing the fictitious case decisions of the penalties.

Because a forced apology is not a genuine apology, the court will not order the respondents to apologize. Respondents are free to choose whether or not to apologize, Castel ruled in his ruling.

According to the newspaper, Roberto Mata claimed a metal serving tray struck his knee on a trip from El Salvador to New York in August 2019 and seriously injured him. The court also approved Avianca’s plea to dismiss the complaint in a separate judgment.

In April, ChatGPT erroneously included a respectable and innocent US law professor on a list of legal experts who had previously mistreated students sexually as part of a research project.

Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, was horrified to see that ChatGPT had included him in a study on legal academics who had harassed someone sexually.

Turkey tweeted, “ChatGPT recently published a false story accusing me of sexually assaulting students.”