Lawyer Blames ChatGPT For Fake Citations In Court Filing

A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT to prepare a court filing for his client is finding out the hard way that the artificial intelligence tool has a tendency to fabricate information. Steven Schwartz, a lawyer for a man suing the Colombian airline Avianca over a metal beverage cart allegedly injuring his knee, is facing a sanctions hearing on June 8 after admitting last week that several of the cases he supplied the court as evidence of precedent were invented by ChatGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI. Lawyers for Avianca first brought the concerns to the judge overseeing the case. "Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations," U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel said earlier this month after reviewing Avianca's complaint, calling the situation an "unprecedented circumstance." The invented cases included decisions titled "Varghese v. Schwartz ― an attorney with Levidow, Levidow & Oberman who's been licensed in New York for more than 30 years ― then confessed in an affidavit that he'd used ChatGPT to produce the cases in support of his client and was "unaware of the possibility that its content could be false."