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Lawyer fined for legal filings that included 'hallucinated' AI citations
- cranberryturkey 3y agohttps://brisk.news/read/articles:9vrye2yws3x0osiu7o6p https://brisk.news/read/articles:9vrye2yws3x0osiu7o6p
- mateo1 3y agoHe should have lost his license after keeping up. There should be a serious fine (at least 10x the time of other people they have wasted) and loss of professional licenses upon the first repeat of the offense. You want to use AI to discover similar cases? You want to use it for ideas on how to structure your line of defense? Good. The moment you submit it's output under your name though, expect repercussions.
- solfox 3y agoFair, but having experienced family court firsthand, the bar does not care if you lie. It's considered fair play in court. How is this any different?
- ysofunny 3y agothere's a difference between things spoken out loud and things written down? to speak is not equivalent to writting
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoIn most European law, there is no such distinction.
- lupire 3y agoUS law too.
- ysofunny 3y agobut there's nonetheless a difference surely not in principle because anything that's been written may be read out and spoken (and viceversa, anything is potentially transcribe-able) nonetheless, when push comes to shove there's a real difference: written stuff (text) is readily usable as evidence but things only ever spoken are not.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoSpoken as in hearsay? Probably not. Spoken with witnesses? Most definitely.
- dylan604 3y agoI think that lawyers should be sworn in just like the witnesses. The fact they are not has always bothered me
- orionsbelt 3y agoLawyers are bound by ethical rules of the profession and also take an oath when being admitted as lawyers.
- aaomidi 3y agoWhich the bar is not enforcing.
- solardev 3y agoIs any of that legally binding?
- frognumber 3y agoYes, but entirely unenforced. The bar acts like an old-time guild designed to protect insiders. On paper, it's intended to be self-policing (file a complaint with the Board of Bar Overseers and see it go into the circular file).
- solardev 3y agoBut I mean, isn't that different than something actually being illegal, and subject to prosecution?
- justinclift 3y ago> Lawyers are bound by ethical rules of the profession Those "rules" are often seen as advisory (or less) though, as they're commonly completely ignored.
- gamblor956 3y agoHaving experienced family court firsthand as a clerk, and as a member of the ethics committee, I can tell you that the bar absolutely does care if a lawyer lies in court. It is a sanctionable offense. At the low end, it is a fine in the thousands. The usual sanction is a suspension of the lawyer's license to practice for several months. At the upper end, the penalty is revocation of one's license to practice law.
- solfox 3y agoWhy, then, is it most common for a judge to fine a lawyer $999 if they bother to issue sanctions against them? A laughable and seemingly arbitrary hand-slap for an attorney making $550+/hour! But it's not arbitrary because a $1000+ fine would result in mandatory reporting to the bar. One recent high-profile example of such a consequence-avoiding fine is THIS VERY CASE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/16/chatgpt-lawyer-fired-ai/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/16/chatgpt...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CPLX 3y agoDon't be ridiculous. Technology is confusing. A person should spend decades of their life studying law and practicing it and then have their career ended because they didn't realize that this new tool everyone said was so amazing was fundamentally and conceptually different from every search engine he'd seen before and (unlike what he otherwise would have used, Westlaw) comes up with random made up but very plausible sounding precedents when you ask it for legal research? Embarrassed, called out, fined? Of course. But that's not a serious argument. Unless you think someone should be legally prohibited from ever being paid as a programmer for the rest of their life for blowing up a server or failing to maintain a backup system or something This is a mistake, and a pretty easy to understand one. It's not stealing client's money or tampering with a witness or something.
- lupire 3y ago1. He used a tool that displayed a warning label saying that it's not trustworthy. 2. He didn't check the results against official, established database. 3. He got caught, lied about it, and then did it all again. 4. The legal bar for good reason, has a bigger ethical standard than the average business. These are officers of the Court. This is equivalent to a doctor prescribing a patient to take medication from a 3P seller FURODNZ on Amazon.com
- Isamu 3y agoHe had three others doing the research preparing the brief, that means especially the citations that were fake. He did not realize they didn’t do the due diligence to check that the citations were correct, let alone that they were not completely invented. But he was the person on the hook with the judge. This amounts to filing false statements and that is well known issue that we don’t have to invent new penalties for.
- lupire 3y agoDisbarment isn't a new penalty. As the licensed member of the bar, his one job is to be responsible for the output of his team. If he's not doing that, then he doesn't need to be a lawyer. His staff can file their BS directly to the court.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoThe first one is not a lawyer, so cannot be disbarred. The second one allegedly only quickly checked the examples provided by his associates.
- danielfoster 3y agoI found it astounding that the judge accepted the lawyer's excuse that two recent law graduates were responsible for the AI citations. No recent graduate would use AI in this manner. Everyone deserves a second chance, but I would have increased the fine to $10,000 for this clear failure to accept responsibility.
- frognumber 3y agoFines for lawyers are set at slap-on-the-wrist levels. Violating legal ethics almost always carries higher expected benefit than expected penalty, which is why most lawyers are crooks (even ones who don't want to be). It's impossible to be a competitive lawyer in many domains while still following legal ethics. In this case, 10% odds of getting caught · $2000 = $200 per violation, generously, so less than one billable hour.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lolinder 3y agoWhy would no recent graduate use AI in this manner? I'd imagine that a lot of law schools have started warning students against it, but in other fields there's often quite a pronounced lag between changes in the field and changes in the curriculum. Even if the best schools have adapted, I'd be shocked if there aren't a bunch that haven't.
- danielfoster 3y agoRecent graduates would have at least played around with AI enough to notice how it can be incorrect or at least heard about this from peers. An older lawyer less familiar with technology is much less likely to have this experience. Furthermore, the lawyer blamed two recent graduates. I find it unlikely that two people together would make this mistake. This seems like classic boomer behavior.
- m_eiman 3y agoCan we stop call AIs giving incorrect information ”hallucinations”, please? It’s just a clever PR stunt to sweep the glaring issues under a carpet.
- linkjuice4all 3y agoAny recommendations? The public seems to actually understand what this means although it’s just more anthropomorphization of a random bullshit generator.
- roblabla 3y agocall it what it is: random bullshit.
- TehShrike 3y agoI always thought of hallucinations/dreams as "random bullshit in my brain"
- Kerb_ 3y agoWell, both the true and false outputs are equally random bullshit from a machine. "Hallucination" is just the word that caught on to describe random bullshit outputs that are false.
- card_zero 3y agoEven "bullshit" implies something like a mind, with intent to deceive. It should be more like noise, aberrations, incorrectly extrapolated filler material.
- lupire 3y agoBullshit is not deception. There is no intent to convince. Bullshit is even less than that. Bullshit is just blowing hot hair to create a buffer between reality and it's consequences.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
- solfox 3y agoOne day, not too long from now, the judge will be an AI, lawyers will not exist, and true justice will be here.
- ysofunny 3y agoyou may as well prepend "in the kingdom of heaven" like so: "in the kingdom of heaven the judge is a perfect AI, lawyers do not exist, and true justice does happen normally"
- jprete 3y agoWhy, exactly, do you believe that AI will be more just than human judges?
- ysofunny 3y agomore difficult to bribe and threaten? immunity to blackmail?
- lesuorac 3y agoIf we wanted justice we'd have an inquisitive system not an adversarial one. At some point the government will decide it's best to pay a private company to administer computerized court systems. Private companies already can collect evidence, process evidence, arrest people, detain suspects long-term (Jail) and after court hold the convicts; why not let them do this one step as well?
- solfox 3y ago
- lolinder 3y agoThere was a similar incident last year [0], but in that case the lawyer actually doubled down on the fake cases and, when pressed to produce evidence of the fake cases, submitted screenshots of them asking ChatGPT to confirm that the cases were real. At least this one had the good sense to apologize instead! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36097900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36097900
- yieldcrv 3y agoSloppy lawyer, they need to clean their office up
- leobg 3y agoCongrats for having judges who actually read the citations. As a lawyer in Germany, I find that most judges will barely read the body of a brief, let alone look up citations.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- g42gregory 3y agoI am not sure how is this news. If a lawyer submits filings with non-factual things in them, will he get fined? - Yes. How should this be different when using AI tools? Are AI tools statistical in nature and will produce incorrect answers sometimes? - For sure. Therefore, proceed with caution and verify the entire filing, as you are the one signing it.