US lawyer to pay $5K fine for presenting fake AI cases via ChatGPT
San Francisco, June 23 (IANS) A US judge has sanctioned the lawyer who submitted a legal brief written by the AI chatbot ChatGPT, which included citations of non-existent court opinions and fake quotes.
Lawyer Steven A Schwartz, who sued Colombian airline Avianca after believing that citations given by ChatGPT are real while they were, in fact, bogus, has been fined $5,000 by US District Judge in Manhattan, P. Kevin Castel, reports CNBC.
Along with Schwartz, the court also sanctioned and fined lawyer Peter LoDuca in the same incident.
Castel said that the attorneys, LoDuca and Schwartz, “abandoned their responsibilities” when they submitted the AI-written brief in their client’s lawsuit against the Avianca airline in March, and “then continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question”, the report stated.
He also ordered them to notify each judge falsely identified as the author of the bogus case rulings about the sanction.
“The court will not require an apology from respondents because a compelled apology is not a sincere apology. Any decision to apologise is left to Respondents,” Castel wrote in his order.
The judge also granted Avianca’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit in a separate order, filed on behalf of Roberto Mata, who claimed a metal service tray hit his knee during an August 2019 flight from El Salvador to New York, injuring him severely, according to the report.
In April, ChatGPT, as part of a research study, falsely named an innocent and highly-respected law professor in the US on the list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed students in the past.
Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, was left shocked when he realised ChatGPT named him as part of a research project on legal scholars who sexually harassed someone.
“ChatGPT recently issued a false story accusing me of sexually assaulting students,” Turkey posted in a tweet.