Judge Cancels Trial and Disqualifies All Four Lawyers After Both Sides Used AI to File Hallucinated Citations
Published · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: 404media.co ↗
"There were two clients who basically were paying for ChatGPT (or whatever LLM) to argue against itself."
In a federal court case in Mississippi over unpaid legal fees, lawyers on both sides were caught submitting AI-generated filings full of hallucinated case citations. Senior U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock was not amused — she sanctioned all four attorneys, fined them between $1,000 and $3,500 each, barred two from her court for two years, cancelled the trial, and disqualified everyone involved.
The judge's sanctions order noted that the court was "yet again 'burdened with addressing AI hallucinations in court filings,'" and that the case represented a "prime example of the risk associated with serving as a rubber-stamp." One lawyer observer described the situation as "a comedy of AI errors" in which two clients essentially paid for ChatGPT to argue against itself.