A lawyer used ChatGPT to prepare a court filing. It went horribly awry.
A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT to prepare a court filing on behalf of a man suing an airline is now all too familiar with the
artificial intelligence (AI) tool’s shortcomings — including its propensity to invent facts.
Roberto Mata sued Colombian airline Avianca last year, alleging that a metal food and beverage cart injured his knee on a
flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York. When Avianca asked a Manhattan judge to dismiss the lawsuit based on the
statute of limitations, his lawyer submitted a brief based on research done by ChatGPT.
While ChatGPT can be useful to professionals in numerous industries, including the legal profession, it has proved itself to be
both limited and unreliable. In this case, the AI invented court cases that didn’t exist, and asserted that they were real. The fabrications
were revealed when Avianca’s lawyers approached the case’s judge, saying they couldn’t locate the cases cited in Mata’s lawyers’
brief in legal databases.
“It seemed clear when we didn’t recognize any of the cases in their opposition brief that something was amiss,” said the
airline’s lawyer. And soon they figured it was some sort of chatbot of some kind. On the other hand, the passenger’s lawyer said that
it was the first time he’d used ChatGPT for work and, therefore, he was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.
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