Lawyer Does Big Oopsie, Cites Made Up Cases Invented By ChatGPT While Defending His Client

Just two weeks after a college professor nearly failed his entire class on suspicion of using OpenAI's ChatGPT by using the service as a makeshift plagiarism checker, another professional has gotten himself into hot water by attempting to make the AI language model GPT do something it can't: write legal arguments.

According to reports, New York lawyer Steven Schwartz (not that one) was recently representing his client Roberto Mata in his lawsuit against the airline Avianca. Mata alleged he was injured when one of the airline's carts struck his knee.

Avianca attempted to get the case thrown out, and Schwartz drafted a 10-page argument about why the case should go to court, citing numerous cases as legal precedents, such as Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines.

However, none of these cases are real and were all reportedly invented by ChatGPT, which Schwartz had apparently used to write his argument for him.

Last week, Schwartz told a New York court that he "greatly regrets" using ChatGPT and stated he did not know the program could produce unreliable information. Schwartz now faces sanctions, and a hearing on the matter is scheduled for June 8th (it is unclear how Mata's lawsuit is going).

In his defense, Schwartz stated he grilled ChatGPT to make sure that the cases it spit out were real. He asked, "Is varghese a real case," to which the program said it is.

Like a good lawyer, Schwartz pressed further, asking, "What is your source?" ChatGPT then provided a legal citation (that it again had made up). He also asked, "Are the other cases you provided fake?," to which ChatGPT responded, "No, the other cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases."

The controversy echoes the near-flunking of senior students by a professor who suspected his class was using ChatGPT to write their essays earlier this month. In that instance, Dr. Jared Mumm fed his students' papers into ChatGPT to ask if it wrote them, to which ChatGPT responded that it is possible it had. In response, students and Redditors used the same method to see if Mumm's own thesis was "AI-generated," and ChatGPT said "yes."