On Thursday, a New York federal judge sanctioned lawyers who submitted a legal brief written by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, which comprised of citations of non-existent court opinions and fake quotes.
Judge P. Kevin Castel said that the attorneys, Peter LoDuca and Steven Schwartz, “abandoned their responsibilities” when they submitted the A.I.-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.”
Both LoDuca and Schwartz were ordered by Castle, along with their law firm Levidow— Levidow & Oberman, and they were levied a fine of $5,000. He also commanded them to inform each judge falsely identified as the author of the bogus case rulings about the sanction.
Castel wrote in his order in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, “The Court will not require an apology from Respondents because a compelled apology is not a sincere apology. Any decision to apologize is left to Respondents.”
In a separate order on Thursday, Castel wrote in his order in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, gave Avianca’s motion to dismiss the suit, which the attorneys filed on behalf of Roberto Mata, who claimed his knee was severely injured on an August 2019 flight to New York from El Salvador when he was hit by a metal service tray.
Castel said Mata’s suit was filed after the expiration of a two-year window allowed for legal claims related to international air travel under the Montreal Convention.
The judge said he might not have sanctioned the attorneys if they had come “clean” about Schwartz using ChatGPT to create the brief opposing Avianca’s motion to dismiss the suit.
But Castel said the lawyers showcased “bad faith” by making fake and deceptive statements about the brief and its contents after Avianca’s lawyers expressed concerns that the legal citations in the brief were from court cases did not exist.
“In researching and drafting court submissions, good lawyers appropriately obtain assistance from junior lawyers, law students, contract lawyers, legal encyclopedias and databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis,” Castel wrote in his order.
“Technological advances are commonplace and there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” Castel wrote. “But existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”
ChatGPT was released by OpenAI in November and has since exploded in popularity. People have been using the AI chatbot for personal, professional, and academic purposes including writing letters, drafting work emails, and summarizing research for college assignments, and some studies suggest that generative AI could have huge effects on the legal industry, including the automation of jobs.
In some cases, however, generative AI has been show to “hallucinate,” or make up information and repeatedly insist that it is correct.
Castel, the judge, criticized Levidow, Levidow & Oberman for not “coming clean about their actions” quickly enough.
He said that the firm and its lawyers “abandoned their responsibilities when they submitted non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, then continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question.”
Castel fined Levidow, Levidow & Oberman $5,000, and ordered the law firm to send letters to each judge falsely identified as an author of one of the fake opinions.
“Technological advances are commonplace and there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” Castel wrote. “But existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”
In a statement sent to Insider, Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said it had “reviewed the Court’s order and fully intend to comply with it,” but added that “we respectfully disagree with the finding that anyone at our firm acted in bad faith. We have already apologized to the Court and our client.”
“We continue to believe that in the face of what even the Court acknowledged was an unprecedented situation, we made a good faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth.” Attorneys for LoDuca declined to comment beyond Levidow, Levidow & Oberman’s statement.
