ChatGPT lands lawyers in legal hot water

Two apologetic lawyers responding to an angry judge in Manhattan federal court blamed ChatGPT Thursday for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing.

Attorneys Steven A. Schwartz and Peter LoDuca are facing possible punishment over a filing in a lawsuit against an airline that included references to past court cases that Schwartz thought were real but were actually invented by the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.

Schwartz explained that he used the groundbreaking program as he hunted for legal precedents supporting a client’s case against the Colombian airline Avianca for an injury incurred on a 2019 flight.

The chatbot, which has fascinated the world with its production of essay-like answers to prompts from users, suggested several cases involving aviation mishaps that Schwartz hadn’t been able to find through the usual methods used at his law firm.

The problem was, several of those cases weren’t real or involved airlines that didn’t exist.

Schwartz told U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel he was “operating under a misconception ... that this website was obtaining these cases from some source I did not have access to.”

He said he “failed miserably” at doing follow-up research to ensure the citations were correct.

“I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” Schwartz said.

Microsoft has invested some $1 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Its success, demonstrating how artificial intelligence could change the way humans work and learn, has generated fears from some. Hundreds of industry leaders signed a letter in May that warns “ mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Judge Castel seemed both baffled and disturbed at the unusual occurrence and disappointed the lawyers did not act quickly to correct the bogus legal citations when they were first alerted to the problem by Avianca’s lawyers and the court. Avianca pointed out the bogus case law in a March filing.

The judge confronted Schwartz with one legal case invented by the computer program. It was initially described as a wrongful death case brought by a woman against an airline only to morph into a legal claim about a man who missed a flight to New York and was forced to incur additional expenses.