A New York lawyer is facing possible penalties after he used the popular ChatGPT to compose a brief only to discover that the artificial intelligence (AI) application had invented a whole series of alleged legal precedents.
As published by The New York Times on Saturday, the lawyer in trouble is Steven Schwartz, a lawyer in a case that is being resolved in a New York court, a lawsuit against the airline Avianca filed by a passenger who claims he suffered an injury while being hit with a service cart during a flight.
Schwartz represents the plaintiff and 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.
“The Court is facing 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 this month.
On Friday, Castel issued an order calling for a hearing on June 8 in which Schwartz must try to explain why he should not be sanctioned after trying to use completely false precedent assumptions.
He did so one day after the lawyer himself submitted 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 he cited were real.
Schwartz justified himself by assuring that he had never used a tool of this type 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.
The document, seen by EFE, closes with an apology in which Schwartz deeply regrets having used artificial intelligence to support his investigation and promises never to do so again without fully verifying its authenticity.
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