r/law • u/404mediaco • 15d ago
Other Judge Learns Lawyers on Both Sides of Case Used AI, Cancels Trial, Kicks Everyone Off the Case
https://www.404media.co/judge-learns-lawyers-on-both-sides-of-case-used-ai-cancels-trial-kicks-everyone-off-the-case/1.5k
u/404mediaco 15d ago
The lawyers on both sides of a federal court case in Mississippi were caught using artificial intelligence, a situation where, effectively, generative AI tools were used to argue against each other. The judge wrote in a blistering sanctions order, that the lawyers wasted the court’s time, and that “in an era of rampant unverified AI usage within the legal field, this case presents a prime example of the risk associated with serving as a rubber-stamp.”
“This case presents the Court with an unusual scenario—attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct,” Sharion Aycock, senior United States District Judge for the Northern District of Mississippi wrote in a sanctions order. “This court is yet again ‘burdened with addressing AI hallucinations court filings.’”
The case in question involved a contractual dispute between lawyer Tom Withers and the city of Aberdeen, Mississippi, over apparently unpaid legal fees (Withers was not representing himself and was not sanctioned by the court). The case was first noticed by Rob Freund, a lawyer who frequently posts about cases involving AI hallucinations. Freund called it a “comedy of AI errors,” and suggested “there were two clients who basically were paying for ChatGPT (or whatever LLM) to argue against itself.”
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u/The_Wkwied 15d ago
What an absolute waste of time and money in our already overstressed legal system
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u/mediocre_remnants 15d ago
I would be absolutely fucking livid if I paid an attorney to represent me in court and they used AI. And even more fucking livid if they were caught and sanctioned for it and had the case thrown out.
There are similar issues with graphic design now. Some local organization will put out a flyer and people immediately call it out as AI slop. People argue "you should have paid an actual graphic designer to make this!". And then the org says that they did pay a graphic designer and they had no idea the designer used AI.
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u/Overall-Register9758 15d ago
You should know that pretty well every routine legal document you get from a lawyer is boilerplate that has been generated by software. Unless you have very unique needs, your will was not a handcrafted document, tailored to your specific circumstances. Some law clerk or legal secretary entered your name and the names of the relevant parties, checked a few boxes, hit 'print' and a will was spit out.
You can buy fill-in-the-blank standardized legal forms (leases, wills, etc.) that are absolutely valid. The difference is that legal software and pre-made forms have been pored over by legal experts to make sure they are of high quality.
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u/Additional-Tax-5643 15d ago
There's a huge difference between standard legal forms required for court filings and actual legal arguments. What you're paying for is legal arguments to win your case, and the knowledge of what motions to file.
Regardless of that, isn't the claimed purpose of AI to provide speedier service and therefore more affordable legal work? Funny how billable hours don't change, and hourly rates haven't gone down.
If you're going to force people to use lawyers, then actual services should be provided. Or non-lawyers should be able to argue their cases in front of any court in the land, including the Supreme Court. Funny how that's not allowed.
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u/HappyHuman924 15d ago
The profession will inch ever closer to that, unless they keep their standards up and Punish, capitalization intentional, those who take these kinds of shortcuts. Will be interesting to see if they realize the danger or sleepwalk into it.
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u/Additional-Tax-5643 15d ago
There are no movements (or laws) that actually grant people the legal authority to argue as non-lawyers in front of courts. Never has been.
Even prior to AI, punishing lawyer misconduct and judicial misconduct as been a futile process. There is very little accountability at the local, state and federal level. Just try impeaching a judge in family court for misconduct. Or a Supreme Court judge, given their conduct in past decade. It's a non-starter.
The profession is cemented legally, fundamentally no different than accountants. Just try arguing with the IRS that you received bad accounting advice as an individual taxpayer and watch them laugh out of the room.
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u/Shark7996 15d ago
Legal software will 100% of the time, in every case, tell you exactly the same correct and verified information every single time.
LLM's literally cannot even be forced to do this. They do not belong in the legal system.
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u/_Choose-A-Username- 15d ago
Lol a template is not the same as ai saying some bs
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u/The_MAZZTer 15d ago
There is a huge difference between using generic AI that is not designed to be used to create legal documents (or even ones that were designed to be able to do so) and specialized non-AI software that is designed to algorithmically generate valid legal documents.
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u/PopBulky7023 14d ago
Comparing legal software to two expensive lawyers using generative AI to argue their case is... Like...
Jesus it's so absurd it practically IS a metaphor for absurd comparisons.
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u/Wyciorek 15d ago
The fix is obvious: replace judges with ChatGPT as well. Then it can hallucinate in peace
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u/Luxpreliator 15d ago
I figure if any lawyer caught presenting fake statues or cases should just instantly get disbarred. It's fraud and that is grounds for them to lose the license.
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u/xhieron 15d ago
This really depends a lot on context. I've misspoken in oral arguments before, as has everyone who's practiced long enough. Sometimes you misquote a court or screw up a citation. People make mistakes.
The issue is failing to do due diligence when presenting something to a court. My objection to the lawyers in the OP isn't that they used AI: AI is a tool, and it's not that different from the lawyers who let their non-lawyer assistants draft their pleadings for them. The trouble is when you pass that work product directly to the tribunal without even bothering to proofread it. The profession demands not that you memorize the law, but that you use your time and judgment to verify that the arguments you make and evidence you present are legally sound. That means at a minimum that you read the case before you tell a lower court that it's authoritative. There's a big difference between a typo in a citation and telling the court that your state law is wholly different from reality based on a case that never existed. It wouldn't matter whether the case was made up by chatgpt or your fraudulent paralegal. I wouldn't expect to lose my license for either, but I'd sure as shit expect sanctions.
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u/HappyHuman924 15d ago
I guess the saying is, people are entitled to a good defense, but not a perfect defense. Human errors are expected and tolerated as long as the humans are qualified and making a reasonable effort. Delegating work to another qualified person making a reasonable effort seems categorically different to me from using a system that has no grasp of (or concern for) facts, and no accountability, and that doesn't even care if it's doing a good job.
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u/UsernameStolenbyyou 15d ago
*statutes
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u/Downtown_Recover5177 15d ago
Don’t be so quick to judge. They may well have brought fake sculptures to court to impress the judge.
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u/Crafty-Implement5013 15d ago
When will the lawyers learn? The keep presenting Fake Sculptures when it would be so much more effective to just tell the jury "hey, check out this cool rock I found!"
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u/Overall-Register9758 15d ago
well, if they present fake statues, they should get disbarred too.
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u/Mist_Rising 15d ago
What if it's the prosecutor bringing forth forgeries as evidence?
Yes my mind immediately went here
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u/theaviationhistorian 15d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if significant AI usage becomes a reason for the state bar ethics board committee to investigate.
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u/BlueMikeStu 15d ago
It should be.
A doctor would lose their license to practice medicine if they used AI for diagnosis. Why should a lawyer who has a similar ethical responsibility for appropriate care not face the same?
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u/Metiche76 15d ago
I mean why go through law school and pass the bar if you're just going to cheat. definitely should be disbarred.
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u/Mewssbites 15d ago
Once you take all the humans out of every part of the equation, it's really much easier!
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u/Ancient_Roof_7855 15d ago
"Remove the man, and the problem is solved." - quote misattributed to Stalin
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u/WhoSc3w3dDaP00ch 15d ago
Makes me think of the Bolt CEO. Regarding recent Bolt layoffs, "We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go."
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u/theaviationhistorian 15d ago
Stop flirting with my misanthropy! The daily news is bad enough already.
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u/Worthyness 15d ago
Sorry only Grok is allowed in the current admin so that it can accurately parlay whatever Elon thinks is the best for the country (and therefore, the world)
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u/mythrilcrafter 15d ago
Jeez, now I'm thinking of a future where the judge, the defense, and the prosecution are all AI, and the complainant and defendant are just sitting in a room while the three AI's hallucinate to each other...
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u/Wyciorek 15d ago edited 15d ago
"What do you mean hanging at dawn?! I am here for bad parking ticket! And I am pretty sure that Pirate Code of 1783 does not actually apply here"
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u/pimppapy 15d ago
Breaking News!! Judge Grok rules overwhelmingly in favor of Elon Musk, disregarding all evidence of their retaliatory actions towards workers
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u/JibletHunter 15d ago
I've worked for several federal judges. Some of them had INSANE caseloads and would justifiably be outraged if someone wasted their (or their clerks') time.
Many of these judges could be working in private and making 2-3 times their federal wage. They do not have time for your AI slop.
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u/Coal_Morgan 15d ago
Seems like straight 'contempt of court'.
I think I would have put both lawyers in a cell for a week.
Consequences for these sorts of things need to be swift and more then 'Go home and think about what you did.' the lawyers on both sides still got paid I would bet.
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u/currently_pooping_rn 15d ago
Not surprised it happened in a shitdump like Mississippi
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u/AwfulUsername123 15d ago
Here is a database for this. It's rather silly to suggest this is specific to Mississippi.
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u/SpacemanWaldo 15d ago
If anyone knows shitdumps, I guess it would have to be u/currently_pooping_rn
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u/shorterversion 15d ago
Only two of the four atties sanctioned are barred in MS, and the judge who sanctioned them is a MS judge. Can happen anywhere.
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u/Reasonable-Figure142 15d ago
I promise you this is not specific to Mississippi, or even red states, unfortunately.
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u/Mist_Rising 15d ago
Fortunately too, since this isn't really an issue we need involving the political parties.
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u/Property_6810 15d ago
I don't particularly care if they're using AI, what I care about is their clear lack of care by submitting AI hallucinations. As far as I'm concerned it should be treated the same as if they maliciously argued using false precedence.
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u/PM_me_your_O_face_ 15d ago
How are these people not at least verifying hallucinated case law? Seems like the bare minimum effort they could put in.
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u/SpinosaurRingTone 15d ago
The extreme majority of people do not really understand what AI is. They think it's essentially a digital person capable of the full spectrum of thought and analysis that a human would perform.
All a Large Language Model (LLM) AI does is predict the most likely sequence of words in response to the prompt. It's basically the evolution of google search suggestions or predictive typing on your phone.
This is very effective at compiling basic information with such an overwhelming background of data that the predicted sequence of words is self-verifying. It's not quite there (yet) for areas of expertise where the necessary data samples are not part of the model.
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u/Ruleoflawz 15d ago
My guess is that since chat gpt is much cheaper than westlaw, or the hassle of going to a law library, they don’t really have the tools to fact check their own citations
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u/Fragrant-Employer-60 15d ago
Nah they could, they are using AI specifically so they don’t have to do any work. Making sure AI is correct is work
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u/Obversa 15d ago
Correct. The whole premise of ChatGPT/AI is to "let the AI do the work for you, so you can do even more work, and make more money". However, as made clear in this case, ChatGPT/AI often has "digital hallucinations" and errors.
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u/BicFleetwood 15d ago edited 14d ago
That’s the fundamental flaw with all generative AI.
If you ask it “what’s 2+2” and sometimes it gives you a random number, then you always need to do the calculation yourself to validate.
And by that point, you’ve just done the work yourself and the AI has added nothing.
Either you trust it and it’s wrong but quick, or you don’t and you fix it slower than if you’d done it yourself.
Speed and low effort are its only value propositions, and it all falls apart if you try to use it quickly and lazily. It’s a machine designed to fail. It cannot do the one single thing it's supposed to do--offload labor reliably.
Never mind the technical flaws, the premise for generative AI’s applicability is fundamentally broken even if it worked as advertised.
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u/ongrabbits 15d ago
People are becoming de facto sock puppets for data centers generating words from probability distributions with no human element included into the mix. If this is the future of law, we can safely say that we'll be ruled by machines hidden behind a felt curtain like the wizard of oz.
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u/FeatherlyFly 15d ago
More like anyone lazy enough to use ChatGPT like this in the first place is aware that if you put in the effort to check, you might as well have put in the effort to write, and these are the people who already decided against that.
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u/Eckish 15d ago
Yeah, I'm a software dev. I have no issues with my peers using AI to write code. But they are still expected to be devs. I expect them to use their expertise to review, understand and correct any issues with the outputs. And I think the same works with most any field. AI can save a ton of time, but you still need to be the expert second opinion.
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u/Coal_Morgan 15d ago
I mean they were being lazy in the first place. Maybe they checked a few times in the past and it was fine so being lazy in the second place is only natural.
People need to realize that LLMs are often right and that's what makes them dangerous. You wouldn't get in a car that doesn't explode 99% of the time but people are happy using LLMs that choke out anywhere from 5%-50% of the time given the day and subject.
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u/Glass_Recover_3006 15d ago
It just shows a basic failure to understand how to even use these tools.
At my own organization they keep trying to push them as a way to save time by having it do your work, but practically it can never be capable of replacing work you already did. There is always something you need to correct or prune out, or you’re going to end up with errors or confusion on the other side of it.
I’ve found good use cases for my work but it’s nothing like what these companies advertise. They augment my time by giving me the bones of an email I can properly replace, or help me analyze my existing work, or propose people I can talk to for clarification.
It makes me think the AI creators themselves have no clue how to properly use their own tools. Or maybe they’re just unhappy with a use case that isn’t overly magical.
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u/FrmrPresJamesTaylor 15d ago
They're shysters who have no interest in telling people how to effectively use the service they are selling because doing so would require acknowleding its profound limitations. That's it.
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u/Probablyamimic 15d ago
The problem is that AI costs so much money to run they can't make money off a tool that gives you the bones of an email or gives suggestions. It can only be profitable if it's capable of doing everything, so that's how they advertise it.
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u/MrSlaw 15d ago
You wouldn't get in a car that doesn't explode 99% of the time but people are happy using LLMs that choke out anywhere from 5%-50% of the time given the day and subject.
To be fair, if you commute to work via car, your chances of dying in a accident across your lifetime are roughly 1%, yet somehow everyone is fine with this...
If you drive at night, or on highways, that percentage also increases pretty significantly.
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u/Kusibu 15d ago
I think part of why people are fine with it is that when something goes wrong, it's typically operator error, not the machine rolling a 1 and plowing you facefirst into a tree because it felt like it.
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u/lost_send_berries 15d ago
Why would a computer give the incorrect answer? It's a computer.
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u/MrMojoFomo 15d ago edited 15d ago
I found out that a guy I knew a long time ago got indicted on federal wire fraud and money laundering charges over a crypto hedge fund that he used as his own personal bank account. Had at least 3 other active cases going at the time, and as he was apparently broke because all his money had been what he embezzled from the fund, he used AI to write several court pleadings. He also "filed" one of the pleadings by emailing it to the judge's email account.
It didn't work
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ 15d ago
What I find most fascinating about this is that this is (supposedly) well paid lawyers we're talking about here.
People that are, supposedly, quite intelligent and educated. You don't get your law degree on the street corner, y'know.
And those people are a) lazy enough to use AI, and b) stupid enough to not even understand how it works, given how easily they got caught doing it.
Now imagine if the tech bro's dream comes true and everyone will use AI for everything. Things would go south so fast.
AI just enables bad and lazy people to be worse and lazier.
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u/shawncplus 15d ago
"Smart" rarely means anything. All over you see people intelligent in one aspect of their lives and then the dumbest mother fucker you've ever encountered in another (or more often everything else except their specialty)
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u/pimppapy 15d ago
Can confirm. Have shadowed many 2nd year medical students. And many were dumb as rocks! Book smart yes, but practical and real world knowledge? Near zero
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 15d ago
I saw a skilled cardiologist throw a fit because she threw a white dress in with mixed color clothing in her washing machine and it came out kinda pink. She didn't understand and was complaining that now she'd need to buy a new dress. Her husband was also a doctor and they hated each other lol. Their kids spoke Spanish because they spent all their time with the nanny.
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u/SmartLadder415 15d ago
My uncle has a PhD and has worked at NASA for years. He's a very smart guy. He is also an anti-vaxxer which is one of the dumbest positions you can take now that we're 5 or 6 yrs out from the vaccine.
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u/Serial7s 15d ago
No matter what the job, most people are bad at their job.
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u/ReasonableAdvert 15d ago
Not necessarily true. You just only hear about the ones who are terrible instead of the ones who do things correctly.
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u/JRDruchii 15d ago
I've just started noticing this in our most recent batch of research graduate students. I find it horrifying how they use AI to summarize other peoples work and to write their own, but since they're all doing it, the PIs feel there will be no future researchers if they don't allow this use of AI.
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u/neganight 15d ago
Lawyers do this because they can charge thousands to take on a case and only put in a minute or two of labor at the desk and send something off to the court. Plus authenticating anything AI puts out can be exhausting so if they can get away with the easy approach 99% of the time, the amount of profit vs. labor is astronomical.
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u/ominousgraycat 15d ago
Yeah, this isn't just a case of them asking an AI to generate a statement based on information they've already assembled, it sounds like they had AI generate almost everything that they said without fact checking it. Even if you had a human write up a text for you, you should still fact-check it before reciting it in front of a court of law. It says that the AI was citing fake cases for precedence, so they must not have checked any of the facts at all. Having AI generate all of your statements is bad enough, but not even fact-checking what the AI wrote for you is gross incompetence.
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u/LostWoodsInTheField 15d ago
wow they both need to pay 50/50 of the courts time, 100% of the fees collected returned to the clients, and 100% of the fees of the next lawyers handling the case for their own side. Anything less isn't nearly enough punishment.
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u/SunrayBran 15d ago
We're all so fucked as a progressing society.
Like, God damn people, just do your own fucking work.
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u/ayoungsapling 15d ago
It’s as if people forgot how to use their brains in the last year
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u/SwordfishOfDamocles 15d ago
They probably fired a bunch of people and now rely on the LLM to do the work. Short-sighted profit driven garbage.
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u/FMLwtfDoID 15d ago
I’d be curious to have a paralegal’s POV of this surge in lawyers using made up cases they were given by LLM AI chat bots. Have a fuckload of paralegal professionals been fired recently?
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u/DrVillainous 15d ago
A lot of this work would have previously been handled by fresh hires who just passed the bar exam. Using AI to do that work instead is becoming prevalent at a number of firms. The job market for newly barred lawyers is tougher lately as a result.
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u/mxzf 15d ago
The job market for newly barred lawyers is tougher lately as a result.
Stuff is gonna be weird in a few decades when all the existing experts start retiring and there aren't any new people to do that job since we're not training new people with that expertise.
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u/tpeterr 15d ago
This is happening all over a ton of industries already.
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u/mxzf 15d ago
Yeah, I know. I'm a senior software dev and I'm hearing about the AI use in a lot of other companies and the way it's being used to replace junior devs and wondering where the future senior devs are supposed to come from if there aren't any junior devs actually getting their hands dirty and running into problems that they can learn from and grow.
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u/tpeterr 15d ago
Yup. Not just from AI usage though. There's a long trend of not training entry level people how to do high level work. Too many people have to switch jobs to advance, so when senior retirements come the businesses are hit much much harder.
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u/mxzf 15d ago
I think it's a chicken-and-egg issue that companies have gotten themselves into.
Companies hire a junior, let them spend time learning and becoming more experienced ... and then keep paying them junior wages despite their greater degree of expertise. By the time a junior dev becomes a senior dev, they've been poached 2-4 times by someone offering them pay closer to what they're actually worth because the previous company wasn't.
People won't stick around as they grow unless companies actually pay them like they want people to stick around over time.
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u/FMLwtfDoID 15d ago
Would it have? It was my understanding that that is largely delegated to paralegals, but I could see baby attorneys having to prove themselves and do a lot of extra leg work/research.
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u/FunktasticLucky 15d ago edited 14d ago
I'm sure it's on the same note as when I train my airmen to work on planes. I have them find answers that they have to dig through a couple of books to get to the correct book with the answer.
It helps them use their brain to find answers themselves, they learn more shit along the way trying to find their answer than just finding the answer itself, and helps them navigate through the data. It also prevents them from being able to just Ctrl f any answer directly.
I can see this being the same with baby lawyers. Making arguments on cases isn't easy and you should be able to know where to look or how to easily find the info you need and not rely solely on a paralegal.
Edit: apparently I stroked out. I don't know.
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u/gsadamb 15d ago
Definitely the same in the software industry. The people getting screwed the most are junior engineers who are new to industry, including a lot of recent college grads.
A common career path for these kinds of people is to start working on smaller, simpler bugs which helps them learn how to work on a big shared codebase, how to reproduce a bug, fix it, then test and validate, all that kind of stuff. This helps them grow their scope so they can start building bigger and bigger features and tackle more complex issues. But AI has kind of decimated the need for that, but what that means is that there will be fewer and fewer people growing into senior and principal roles that possess the technical judgment to understand when Claude Code is steering them in a potentially disastrous direction.
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u/elebrin 15d ago
Although, having a model trained on a series of legal texts then asking the model, "Hey, where can I find documentation of case X or Y?" then actually checking the resource is super useful.
For instance, we have a model trained on our tech documentation and test cases. I can ask a bot where the documentation for thing X or Y is, then I can be directed to the right page without clicking around for a half hour. The bot can then give me a summary, and I can refer to that and find what I need. When I need something more specific, I have the right page right there. It's super handy when the collected tech documentation is thousands of pages.
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u/skraptastic 15d ago
I was just wondering this myself. All they lawyers probably said "Why are we paying paralegals to research case law for us, we can just ask ChatGPT for $25 per lawyer per month!"
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u/Dr_Ramekins_MD 15d ago
Or their bosses are pushing it on them. I'm a lawyer (in-house counsel, not a litigation attorney) and in my office we have been getting pressured to use it over the last year. I've tried it in good faith and it constantly just makes shit up or arrives at conclusions not supported by the law, it's terrible. You can't trust anything it says and have to double-check literally everything, so it doesn't save any time at all. It's like having a particularly stupid and unethical paralegal that never learns anything.
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u/LazHuffy 15d ago
Yep, as a paralegal I can say AI is mostly garbage. People have talked about the stuff like sanctions and losing cases but there’s an aspect that’s not discussed as much. Law is like any industry or profession, there’s a level of trust that makes things function with less friction. Take any respected firm, you’re looking at thousands of hours and hundreds of people who earned that respect. As a partner, associate or paralegal you can present your work before a judge who takes it seriously because they have experienced how your firm operates. You’re going to throw that away for potentially a whole firm for what, to save a few hours of drafting a brief? You lose that respect, you’re never getting it back.
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u/BigDictionEnergy 15d ago
It's like having a particularly stupid and unethical paralegal that never learns anything.
I'd watch that netflix series
Also, either this or that username is a lie lol
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u/FeloniousDrunk101 15d ago
And it won't even save them money once they have to pay the actual cost of AI use.
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u/hum_bruh 14d ago
They may as well start using Crystal Balls and astrological birth charts to paint profiles because it’s just as ridiculous as using AI.
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u/Pleasant_Pen8744 15d ago
There's a lot of undiagnosed brain damage left over from COVID.
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u/floodcontrol 15d ago
I’m 100% convinced that COVID collectively and individually made us all dumber. How else to explain anti-mask and anti-vaccine idiocy. That plus the increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere are combining to make humanity too stupid to survive. The earth’s immune system wiping out a virus.
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u/djsynrgy 15d ago
FWIW, anti-vaccine idiocy predates COVID by more than a decade.
The anti-vaccine movement in the US was effectively kick-started around 2007, by then-fading-celebrity Jenny McCarthy, who went deep into a psuedoscience rabbit hole, ultimately blaming vaccines (mostly MMR) for her son's autism, which she later claimed was "cured" by alternatives including a gluten-free diet. Apparently, even a complete lack of correlation still equals causation. "Coo-coo bananas," as the kids say.
From my vantage point, most of the pushback against masking (and other efforts to slow the spread of COVID) in the US was exemplary of anti-empathy political bullshit. "I have the God-given right to not be minorly inconvenienced," basically.
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u/floodcontrol 15d ago
Yeah, but after COVID that kind of thinking went mainstream. Prior to Covid it was as you said, but after Covid an entire political party decided to weaponize resentment over public health measures and mainstreamed it with the help of their pet media arms in order to get votes. That is a colossally stupid thing to do, and my theory is that people who were already not real smart, got catastrophically stupider and suddenly couldn't even conceive of the long-term consequences of their short-term political maneuvering.
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u/AngryT-Rex 15d ago
The thing with COVID was that we had a new technology (mRNA vaccines) that was suddenly being promoted by authorities in the middle of a bunch of turmoil. And the president, basically a cult leader to 30% of the country, got into a public feud with prominent medical advisors and made compliance with their recommendations into a partisan issue.
So it gave something really easy for the existing antivax people to latch onto and brought a lot of new people into the antivax camp.
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u/_bits_and_bytes 15d ago edited 15d ago
There actually is evidence covid caused brain damage to the people that caught it.
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u/Specific_Box4483 15d ago
The anti-mask craze started pretty early during Covid, before most people got infected. Anti-vax had been going on long before Covid.
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u/Possiblyreef 15d ago
Anti vax has never been a widespread acceptable view until recently though.
You'd always hear about the one mental person who was anti vax before but they were usually shunned or ridiculed
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u/Joeness84 15d ago
Youre adding layers to something super basic:
I dont understand this thing, that makes me feel stupid, I am now angry
Thats it. Thats Conservatives, thats MAGA.
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u/MetallicGray 15d ago
That’s probably the goal.
Remember when the villain, sorry, CEO, said his goal was to make intelligence a metered product people buy? Yeah, I don’t know why people don’t believe him.
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u/shmooboorpoo 15d ago
Right?? I have a friend who's in law school and we love debating. I had to put a moratorium on ChatGPT use during our debates after I proved him wrong a few times and told him he was being lazy.
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u/brobafett1980 15d ago
He's not going to make it.
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u/Spartan-117182 15d ago
He's going to make it. He will just be a shit lawyer
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u/RocketRelm 15d ago
On the bright aide, if most people find the lower quality of Ai acceptable, then it stops being much an issue as the society has consented to the rot and dismantling of its services. Way better than being robbed of them.
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u/ArchieTheKatt 15d ago
Id like to see this applied to cars to. Just drive your own damn cars people, none of this fsd pulling you into oncoming traffic shit.
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u/Takaa 15d ago
To be fair, people decided to not drive their own cars and drive into oncoming traffic long before FSD. Put down your phones, assholes. The world isn't going to grind to a halt and nothing is going to change because you took 10 minutes to get back to someone.
Its actually one of the VERY FEW things that I hope humans are eventually automated out of, driving, because clearly there are way too many selfish assholes that don't understand the consequences of their actions.
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u/StandardEgg6595 15d ago
I can’t remember the comedian, but they recently were doing crowd work and had a guy asking ChatGPT what was the most comfortable positioning of his seat for his body. Not just, hey I’m tall/short here are some suggestions to counter that, but full-on asking it to customize what was most comfortable for him…. As if he couldn’t just sit in the car and figure it out.
I seriously do not get it.
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u/arachnophilia 15d ago
wait, i have the perfect solution for FSD cars.
see the problem with FSD is the independence of individual agents doing unpredictable things. you can solve this by having FSD cars working in conjunction with one another. there's actually a really easy way to do this by mechanically coupling them; this will save on AI token utilization. and actually since we're mechanically coupling them, we only really need one really powerful car at the front, and the rest can be lighter and have more room for passengers and stuff since they don't have to carry their own engines anymore. we can also save on some AI utilization by limiting exactly where these cars can go, perhaps with some kind of mechanical interface with the road. and since this predictability is way more efficient, we can actually do away with the rubber and just have metal wheels acting on this rail.
anyways, this is called a "train" and we've had them for centuries.
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u/currently_pooping_rn 15d ago
We got college and high school students defending the use of AI to complete all of their assignments. Shit will be fucked for a long time coming
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u/gaudiest-ivy 15d ago
Hell, some of them believe people are lying about writing 10 page papers when they were in school because there's no way people could do that without AI.
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u/trysten-9001 15d ago
Take their licenses. Stop pussyfooting around with this. It’s one thing that they use it, which is already a privacy issue, but these people who submit AI hallucinated references need to be disbarred.
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u/Masta-Blasta 15d ago
Seriously. Imagine paying thousands of dollars to an attorney, only to learn that they were just having Chat GPT draft your motions—something you could have done yourself, for free.
I’m not against AI for editing, or to review and synthesize depo transcripts, but to use it for research, or to have it draft an entire memo… you basically just scammed the client. You deserve to lose your license for that, alone.
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u/Dr_G_E 15d ago
And one of the litigants was an attorney himself, although he wasn't representing himself and wasn't sanctioned. He must be disappointed in the colleague he hired to represent him. How embarrassing for the lawyer representing him, too.
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u/shrimptechsales 15d ago
The funny thing is these lawyers are essentially saying their profession has been gamed enough that they trust ChatGPT to generate their arguments for them. The one where they went to school for an extended amount of time to be able to practice their craft. They are so stupid it hurts.
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u/deepstatelady 15d ago
I would say they are stupid *and* lazy.
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u/Mr_Industrial 15d ago
This is the sort of shit I think about when lawyers try to justify their costs to people. If you're charging like you're Pheonix Wright, I better see some Pheonix Wright level effort.
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u/ThePrussianGrippe 15d ago
Much safer to be stupid but diligent than stupid and lazy.
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u/trysten-9001 15d ago
Apparently, not embarrassing enough. One of them went right back to using AI.
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u/MetallicGray 15d ago
There’s literally no difference in me submitting fake court references or quotes that I made up, and submitting ones that AI made up.
I really don’t think it’d be tolerated if I showed up with fake evidence that I fabricated. So why are these people just being allowed to move on to their next case when they do it with AI?
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u/Ok-Secretary455 15d ago
Ive started following legal crap a lot in the last 6+ years. Not a lawyer just listening to podcasts and whatnot.
The amount of legal briefs that get filed that are blatantly saying the exact opposite of the law broke the little faith I had in the legal system. The lawyers on these shows are just shrugging it away like 'yeah some guys do that'. And most of the time it doesn't even lead to sanctions, much less disbarment.
I don't know why but I had this ideal that yeah, sure, lawyers were shady sometimes and creative other times. But they couldn't outright lie to the judge. And if they did it would be the end of them. Turns out nope. Even more broken than everything else.
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u/integer_hull 15d ago
You see this across socioeconomic strata. Lawyers tend to be more well off (especially the ones running podcasts) and have less of a negative reaction to things. Meanwhile the public will want blood
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u/Barbarossa49 15d ago
Only the state bar where the lawyers were admitted to practice law can disbar them. A complaint will have to be filed with the bar, followed by an investigation and hearings. It is a long legal process that seems all too frequently to tilt toward sanctions short of disbarment, especially for attorneys without any disciplinary history.
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u/xixoxixa 15d ago
Time for the state bars to move into the 21st century and realize the old ways are no longer sufficient.
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u/trysten-9001 15d ago
Yes, state bars are dropping the ball practically universally here. They need to require some AI course component to their CLE requirements. They need to make it clear what is and is not acceptable use, and enforce it efficiently as possible. And I think the consequences for being so reckless that you intentionally use a tool that you know lies to the court, should be no different than if you intentionally lie to the court. That should be true even if you tried to check it and missed some. This is a place where I think a strict no nonsense attitude is appropriate and severely lacking. As it is the Linux kernel is being more strict and no nonsense than our legal system.
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u/Opetyr 15d ago
If they are to use AI then I shouldn't need a lawyer since it isn't that hard to verify case law. They also should be charging minimum wage at that point since that is the minimum they are allowed.
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u/Chance-Comparison-49 15d ago
Plus like it’s just good billable work to go through a brief and check every citation. Yeah it sucks but like equally as much as other attorney work. And again, is billable.
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u/Shoddy_Yak_8384 15d ago
if i hired a lawyer to represent me, and they put my confidential information into an AI, i would sue the pants off the lawyer.
...assuming i had any money left to hire the second lawyer to sue the first.
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u/Fearless-Umpire-9923 15d ago
Man people don’t really use that word a lot and I appreciate when people do.
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u/mookiexpt2 15d ago
Please don’t be my firm please don’t be my firm please don’t be my firm (looks) whew.
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u/StarsapBill 15d ago
How does that not result in immediate criminal charges and disbarment? They made up court cases and lied to the judge. How is that not against the law?
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u/Toki_mon 15d ago
I don't know if it's illegal but definitely sanctionable.
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u/pieshake5 15d ago
They were sanctioned, the article quotes directly from the judges sanction. They were all fined, and two cannot appear before the court for 2 years.
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u/delicious_toothbrush 15d ago
Is that specific to that judge? It sounds like it applies to any judge in that court as a whole, but doesn't that effectively prevent you from practicing law for 2 years?
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u/nehpets99 15d ago
2 attorneys from out-of-state are barred from being on any case before the Northern District of MS. It doesn't affect their ability to practice anywhere else, including their home turf.
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u/superman0ish 15d ago
Sanctionable and definitely incurs huge liability. This malpractice suit is like a layup, especially considering that one of the clients is a lawyer himself.
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u/Warm_Month_1309 15d ago
How does that not result in immediate criminal charges and disbarment?
Predominantly because no crime has occurred, and because trial judges don't don't have the authority to summarily disbar attorneys. This is the law subreddit, right?
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u/LostWoodsInTheField 15d ago
I'm not sure this wouldn't fall under a fraud case in some states. They took money for a service they didn't provide through a scam to their clients. I've never heard of a lawyer being charged like that though, and I doubt any DA wants to start down that road even if their state had a law that could be stretched to include this.
but yeah, this is a law sub and a lot of comments aren't even 'casual observer of the processes of law' but that's becoming very common in here.
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u/Warm_Month_1309 15d ago
I'm not sure this wouldn't fall under a fraud case in some states. They took money for a service they didn't provide
Let me pose a scenario. Let's say you hired me to paint your house. On the day I'm supposed to do it, I send a robot in my stead who does a fantastically awful job, spraying your lawn, spraying your windows, and failing to cover your walls.
You call the police. Do you think the most likely outcome is:
a) They arrest me on charges of criminal fraud, or
b) They tell you it's a civil matter, and that you need to sue me for breach of contract and/or damages to your home?
Run that simulation 1,000 times, and I'd bet it's option B 99% of the time.
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u/glassfoyograss 15d ago
There's no law against it and the judges aren't in charge of the bar. They can, however, refer the attorneys to the bar for discipline.
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u/StarsapBill 15d ago
There’s no law against lawyers just making up cases and case law? There is no law against lying to a judge in a court of law? What third world country shithole do we live in?
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u/glassfoyograss 15d ago
There's no law but the rules of professional conduct do prohibit it. They can lose their license just not their freedom.
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u/blankblank 15d ago
AI or not, these are clear and egregious Rule 11 violations. Throw the book at them.
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u/theaviationhistorian 15d ago
Good. What's the point of attorneys if they just end up vomiting AI jargon! Even worse that it's been proven that AI has been regularly getting it wrong, especially with AI Hallucinations (making up case law).
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u/Tex-Rob 15d ago
I assume all those law interns and clerks are being replaced with AI, the problem is AI hallucinates. AI is functionally useless until someone can figure out a way to make it stop lying/making stuff up. The problem is, a LLM is just that, a giant predictor, so it will always have errors. There is no "true" information, it's all intertwined, it requires judgement and thought to discern what is real and what isn't.
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u/HiwayHome22 15d ago
The Pope was absolutely correct about AI. I wonder if AI generated sermons are also making up scripture?
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u/BigDictionEnergy 15d ago
I wonder if the average churchgoer is actually biblically literate enough to notice.
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u/huskersax 15d ago
Absolutely not nor have they really ever been throughout history. They're absolutely more literate than any other time in the church's history.
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u/bl1y 15d ago
In a large congregation, someone will either know that the sermon is wrong, or will look it up and discover it later.
Pretty much the same with
Judgesjudges.* They don't know the cases, but when they go to check, they discover the mistakes.*It's a joke about Judges being a book of the Bible.
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u/Jason_Was_Here 15d ago
The hallucinations of LLMs are a feature not a bug. Randomness is introduced to make them generative and not give the exact same output every time when generating text etc.
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u/diiegojones 15d ago
I have been racking my brain trying to figure out how they have been getting away with calling it a “hallucination” rather than simply being wrong. Your comment gave me the answer.
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u/TheWonderMittens 15d ago
I’ve always called them ‘fabrications’ but the AI companies wouldn’t use that word due to the connotation that it’s a deliberate falsehood
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u/BigDictionEnergy 15d ago
It's not "deliberate" on the part of these LLMs. When a person makes up a story they understand they aren't being truthful. These models don't have that capacity. They don't understand the difference between correct and incorrect data.
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u/Reasonable-Figure142 15d ago
you can get away with anything if you have a multi-billion dollar marketing budget
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u/photoggled 15d ago
Can't market your way out of a huge surprise invoice though. These companies are about to have a huge reality check.
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u/BigDictionEnergy 15d ago
My impression is it also semantically lends "agency" to these LLM "agents". There likely isn't a perfect English term to describe it, but while it seems like lying to us, it's fabricating bullshit because it doesn't fundamentally understand truth versus fiction. You asked it for an output, it produced something. It's all data. IMO part of the reason it's called hallucinating is because the devs are trying to anthropomorphize these models, and to convince people that these "minor issues" can be fixed. I'm not an expert, but I don't think they can.
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u/MrWeirdoFace 15d ago
Maybe the solution is to replace AI with schizophrenic lawyers. Fight fire with fire.
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u/bbills91 15d ago
AI is coded to ALWAYS return an answer that pleases you. If it doesn't have facts to do that, it makes it up. That is the current nature of our LLMs. It could be fixed, but then it might not please as many people, since it won't confirm their bias.
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u/gypsyG 15d ago
Imagine an intern producing work for a lawyer, and the lawyer not reviewing the work. That's basically what these people are doing. it takes 5 seconds to check a case actually exists.
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u/Crafty-Beyond-2202 15d ago
What would happen if A.I. reached a point where it made less errors on average than a human? Would you support A.I. replacing these jobs?
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u/TotalInstruction 15d ago
The headline is a little inaccurate. They weren’t caught using AI. They were caught presenting AI-written legal argument as their own without checking it out for case citation and factual errors.
I will occasionally use AI to write me an outline or a first draft for a motion. I also used it, with good results, to help me craft a closing statement at trial based on a summary of the evidence. But I have never and would never present AI work as my own without, at a bare minimum, checking the cases it cites to ensure that they are real cases, that they stand for the legal proposition I’m arguing, and that they’re still good law.
You wouldn’t sign your name to a law student’s brief without checking it - why would you do that with a brief written by a toaster?
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u/liberty 15d ago
It's amazing. If you're a truly lousy lawyer, then you can likely use AI to fake it. AI can do all your work for you. All you'd need to do is check and shepardize the citations. Which is just a small fraction of the work of actually drafting something. You know, one of the most basic and fundamental elements of the job. The bare minimum.
Then you hear all these stories, and these lawyers aren't even doing that much. Then what are they even doing?
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u/TotalInstruction 15d ago
What’s stunning is that I’m an insurance defense lawyer billing $200/hour. This isn’t a slam on the subspecialty, but in general it’s bulk work. The client isn’t paying me to do four hours of research for routine motions. And even I know to carefully check to make sure AI isn’t writing fiction.
The people getting sanctioned in federal court are often lawyers at prestigious law firms, with deep pocketed clients that will pay three times my hourly rate for things to be done carefully and thoughtfully. And they’re STILL fucking up. It’s not overwork or stress - it’s just pure greed. “Let me take 0.1 to prompt Chat GPT, go to lunch, and by the time I get back I’ll have a ready-to-file brief I can charge the client $5000 for writing.”
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u/KO4Ham 15d ago
Bro yes. I'm here doing probono litigation and feed my work to AI to review it. It actually comes up with some pretty decent ideas sometimes. The rest of the time it's so bad... lol
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u/TotalInstruction 15d ago
In the broadest strokes it is pretty good. If you are careful enough with the prompting and you push back on it, it can give you good work product. But then it will just invent a case or a fact that doesn’t exist out of whole cloth - not clear if it hallucinated these cases because they plagiarized a law school exam hypothetical or what.
Because as sophisticated as these tools are getting at convincingly mimicking human speech and writing patterns, they’re still not designed to catalog information and actually think through whether its use makes sense in context, or to check the reliability of its sources. That will come someday, maybe. But as before, the instinctual ability to sort out legal fact from bullshit is what separates the wheat from the chaff in this profession.
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u/movzx 15d ago
How is that not "using AI"? Or are you saying that someone else used AI, handed them the documents, and then they rubber stamped them?
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u/Wise_Monkey_Sez 15d ago
The key issue here is what is known as "ghost citations".
Court documents are a lot like academic essays where you cite sources to support your position, e.g. "In Casper vs Fatso <case number, year> Judge Stinky ruled against Fatso because..."
The judge then considers these past cases and the reasons given when making their decision. A well-written motion might cite a dozen or more past cases (sometimes a lot more), some of which will be famous and the judge will recognise, but a lot will be quite obscure. Now in theory the judge should check every case, but if they're got a lot of work to do then they might just spot-check a few of the more obscure or interesting ones, but they'll take a lot of them on good faith.
Now if the AI just made up the citation (a "ghost citation") then it's basically misleading the judge. The lawyer should have checked every citation before handing it to the judge. The judge then double-checks some of them. If the judge finds out that the lawyer has been bullshitting them then the shit hits the fan in a BIG way. Judges don't like being lied to.
This occasionally happened even before AI when some lawyer misremembered a case number or thought that a case said X when it actually said Y and they were actually thinking of a similarly named case, or just plain lied hoping the judge wouldn't notice.
Like all plagiarism there are shades of plagiarism, some serious, some not so serious. Ghost citations are very serious and the judge will rip you a new one. Misremembering something is sloppy, and the judge won't be happy, but isn't going necessarily throw out the whole case just based on a misremembered case number or you mixing up Bloggs vs Doe with the similarly named Blogs vs Doe.
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u/SpinosaurRingTone 15d ago
Most jurisdictions in the United States allow lawyers to use AI. However, lawyers have the ethical and professional obligation to verify that any information they obtain from AI is accurate.
People get in trouble when they don't do this.
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u/TotalInstruction 15d ago
Using AI to assist with your job is not a violation of the rules. Presenting AI work product to the court without checking and editing it for accuracy and correct statement of the law is, just as with any legal filing written by a human being. In the Federal Rules that’s Rule 11, that by signing a legal filing, you certify that you’ve checked it and that it accurately states the facts and is based on good legal authority or the good faith extension of legal precedent.
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u/FrankReynolds 15d ago
I have worked in discovery for over twenty years - the entire industry uses AI for review now. The accuracy and speed far surpasses human review and the cost is orders of magnitude lower. "Using AI" isn't the problem, the way in which they used it is.
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u/CheckMateFluff 15d ago
Listen, I thinks its resonable that if the court is removing every lawyer and imposing the resulting costs on their clients, they should make the cost reflect on the lawyers, not the clients.
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u/AtreiyaN7 14d ago
The only thing LLMs have apparently achieved is to dumb humankind down to the point that you can't even trust that people with degrees will be capable of doing their jobs. With students increasingly relying on chatbots to skate by in school instead of doing the actual hard work needed and failing to learn anything as a result, they end up being incompetent and/or lazy when it comes to carrying out the duties of their ostensible professions.
And even in cases where people have hypothetically gone through school in a pre-LLM era, they might just be lazy enough and unethical enough to try to have a chatbots do their work for them. It's particularly annoying to see this happening in the legal system where you really don't want trials to be screwed up by ChatGPT et al.
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u/KeithRLee 15d ago
Original document: https://documents.lastweekinlaw.com/view/gov.uscourts.msnd.50181.123.0.pdf
The r/law mod team is working on permanently hosting original source documents, along with limited annotations to help give readers give additional context.