Like a student who turned in a ChatGPT-penned term paper only to get it back with a red F on top, one New York attorney must now face the music for letting AI do the heavy lifting after filing a brief containing multiple references to nonexistent cases.
Steven Schwartz of Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who has practiced for more than 30 years, represents a client suing the Colombian airline Avianca over injuries he claims he got when a serving cart bumped into him midflight. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill case, except that Schwartz submitted a brief to the court that included references to what the federal judge hearing the suit called six "bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citation" to support his position.
Turns out, Schwartz relied on ChatGPT for his legal research, and it simply made those cases up---and insisted they were real and available in major legal databases when he asked the bot for a source.
Bottom line: Law is one of several professions that appears to be on the cusp of being transformed by ChatGPT, which takes a whole lot less billable hours to whip up documents, but the chatbot isn't prepared to have its day in court just yet---at least not without a lot of human oversight.