A federal judge tossed a lawsuit and issued a $5,000 fine to the plaintiff’s lawyers after they used ChatGPT to research court filings that cited six fake cases invented by the artificial intelligence tool made by OpenAI. Lawyers Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca of the firm Levidow, Levidow, & Oberman “Abandoned their responsibilities when they submitted non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, then continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question,” US District Judge Kevin Castel wrote in an order yesterday. The real case, Roberto Mata vs. Avianca, was originally filed in a New York state court but was moved to US District Court for the Southern District of New York. At a June 8 hearing on potential sanctions, Schwartz testified that he was “Operating under the false perception that this website [ChatGPT] could not possibly be fabricating cases on its own.” Schwartz stated, “I just was not thinking that the case could be fabricated, so I was not looking at it from that point of view… My reaction was, ChatGPT is finding that case somewhere. Maybe it’s unpublished. Maybe it was appealed. Maybe access is difficult to get. I just never thought it could be made up.”

Source: Lawyers have real bad day in court after citing fake cases made up by ChatGPT

This needs to be said loudly.