NY Lawyer Busted Using ChatGPT To Create Phony Cases

A lawyer in New York is facing sanctions – and possibly worse – after he used the AI service Chat GPT to create a legal brief. The artificial intelligence bot created a list of fake court cases that the lawyer used in his brief, but he got busted when the opposing side couldn’t find any of the made up cases. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A lawyer in New York is facing sanctions and possibly worse after he used the AI service ChatGPT to create a legal brief. The artificial intelligence bot created a list of fake court cases that the lawyer used in his brief. But he got busted when the opposing side couldn't find any of the cases, couldn't find any of the information that was in that brief because it was a big fraud. It was made up by AI. Right? This story, it's so ugly that it's crazy. It's laughable.

It really is.

But it's an ugly story. Right?

And it's so sad because you got this guy Steven Schwartz up in New York, 30 year lawyer. All right. We're not talking about somebody fresh outta law school, didn't know how to write a brief. Guy's been doing this for 30 years. He knows how to write a brief. And honestly sounded like he had a pretty good case there. You got somebody injured on an airplane by the, you know, cart. Sounds like pretty, pretty simple.

Truth is, he's not a bad lawyer. I mean, he really, let me just defend the guy. He's not a bad lawyer. But the AI spits out all of this stuff that AI made up and he doesn't, you know, we all get busy. He doesn't take the time to, wow, that's a great case. It's right on point and it's perfect for me. Oh wait, there are 10 perfect cases for me and it gives me the sites. Well, at some point, don't you say that doesn't look right? He got busy. I mean, that's really the truth. I if I were to drill down on this, that's all that happened here. But it's bizarre.

And you do feel bad a little for him because he says, listen, my kids had told me about ChatGPT. I thought it was a search engine. So I thought it was spitting out all these great cases related to what I needed. Cases like Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines.

They're just made up.

Right. They don't exist. Those were not actual court cases.

Even the sites, even the sites that he uses when he says, judge, I wanna show you this case that is right on point with what I'm saying to you. You should rule for me because 10 cases here say that. Well, okay, if you go into a courtroom and you're loaded like that, buddy, you're ready to rock and roll. Right. Until somebody says, wait a second, judge, this is all made up. It's not real. I don't know. I kind of feel sorry for the guy. He just, you know, probably got busy, didn't take the time to do it. Should have had somebody else take a look at it. But this is what AI is capable of. Right?

Exactly. And that is what is terrifying about this because this is the natural evolution. This is not going to be the first lawyer that tries to use AI to write a legal brief. Like this is just the beginning. This is the opening of it. And we're gonna see it, I think we're gonna see it in the medical field. You know, doctors will say, okay, ChatGPT, I have, you know, increased heart rate, blah blah, blah. What do you got? And we're relying on it too much already. And it is so unreliable that it's terrifying.

Yeah. That's what this case is really about. If I were the judge, I would've really spent some time on the unreliability. Yeah. You gotta beat him up a little bit. He shouldn't have shown, he shouldn't have shown up with that. But, you can see how it could happen.