Two More Cases of Hallucinated Citations in Court Filings Leading to Sanctions

https://www.lawnext.com/2024/02/not-again-two-more-cases-just-this-week-of-hallucinated-citations-in-court-filings-leading-to-sanctions.html

by speckx • 2 years ago

47 13 2 years ago

lawnext.com

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Turns out there are lots of lawyers out there who are morons. I guess being a lawyer is not a high bar (heh).

Terr_• 2 years ago

When we look at certain professions as "smart", I think it's kind of a Fundamental Attribution Error: "That other guy must be an X because he's smart, but I'm a Y just because I happen to know a lot of profession-stuff, you don't need to be that smart to Y..."

cubix• 2 years ago

Having had to recently deal with a prosecuting attorney in a small rural county, even hallucinating AI would be a significant improvement.

SuperNinKenDo2• 2 years ago

I've known quite a lot of lawyers for various reasons.

I would say many of them are rather smart. However I would also say that many of them are not very interedted in things.

That's a strange sentence I know, but what I mean is that they often seem to have a distinct lack of curiosity about the broader world.

I don't quite know why. I can think of a few things that contribute to this: having very little free time during their degree, and then being crazy overworked in internships (matches with doctors, who I find also share this intersection of traits), occupying one of the most adventurous periods of most people's lives for them with narrow toil and misery; mixing in a very incestuous social millieu which is constituted of people who not only work professionally within the same "industry", but usually have very similar backgrounds; charging in 6-minute increments, which has a strange psychological effect on how you spend your free-time by quantifying down to almost a minute the opportunity cost of anything else you spend time learning or doing, all while you already have a reasonably high paying job; already spending an enormous amount of time reading, collecting, arranging, reasoning, and synthesising about knowledge, which, having completed a masters degree, I can assure you, has a deleterious effect on one's capacity and interest in doing so during one's meagre free time.

These are just ad hic theories about what might contribute to the phenomena, but the point is, while many lawyers are intelligent, my experience is they are both ignorant and incurious in many ways.

tekla• 2 years ago

Software Devs are even worse

greenyoda• 2 years ago

The Massachusetts case, Smith v. Farwell, is currently being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491510

sophacles• 2 years ago

In a reply brief, Karlen apologized for citing fictitious cases and said that they came from an online consultant he hired to write the brief who claimed to be an attorney licensed in California.

If the person hired was an attorney - can they be sued by Karlen for his original payment as well as the fines imposed by the court?

If Karlen was scammed, I would hope the Feds take interest in this, as this sort of scam is potentailly very dangerous.

I'm sure there are plenty of other scenarios that could turn out to be the truth (aside from the lawyer used GPT and the "lawyer" used GPT), but assuming Karlen is telling the truth I find these questions to be interesting.

zdragnar• 2 years ago

IF the person is an attorney, he should definitely be filing a complaint with the California Bar, and seeking a refund (possibly going to court if one isn't provided).

However, as a professional, the buck stops with Karlen for what he files. Whether or not GPT was involved is irrelevant, insofar as he relied on what any due diligence would have revealed to be a faulty source.

SuperNinKenDo2• 2 years ago

I don't belueve Karlen was an attorney, he was representing himself, and while that doesnt per se mean he isn't an attorney, I doubt most attorney's would do that.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

It's time to start applying the Cancel Hammer to these idiots' licenses to practice law. "I had no f*cking clue that an AI could make sh*t up!" (but went ahead and used its output for legal purposes, as a licensed attorney) is slam-dunk evidence that you should never have been given that law license to begin with.

Ditto for fictitious cases that some "online consultant" you hired cooked up, or cool-sounding "facts" you learned from YouTube, or advice you received from a Ouija board, or ...

beached_whale• 2 years ago

More so they have access to the legal databases and can verify the sitations.

ungreased0675• 2 years ago

There are lawyer specific LLMs, why are they using Chat GPT?

8harath• 2 years ago

lack of information.... Think of it ChatGPT has 100m MAU whn compared to 5.8B ppl who have acces to internet... people are not well informed or they lack the curiosity to discover more for specific use cases...

Two More Cases of Hallucinated Citations in Court Filings Leading to Sanctions

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