A Manhattan judge has ordered a law firm to pay a $5,000 fine after it submitted a legal brief containing cases made up by ChatGPT.
The clumsy use of ChatGPT has landed a New York City law firm with a $5,000 fine.
Having heard so much about OpenAI’s impressive AI-powered chatbot, lawyer Steven Schwartz decided to use it for research, adding ChatGPT-generated case citations to a legal brief handed to a judge earlier this year. But it soon emerged that the cases had been entirely made up by the chatbot.
U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel on Thursday ordered lawyers Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca, who took over the case from his co-worker, and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, to pay a $5,000 fine.
The judge said the lawyers had made “acts of conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the court,” adding that they had “abandoned their responsibilities” by submitting the A.I.-written brief before standing by “the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question.”
Castel continued: “Many harms flow from the submission of fake opinions.
