New York (EFE)
Judge Kevin Castel considers that the lawyer Steven Schwartz and his partner Peter LoDuca “knowingly ignored” the signals that the cases that ChatGPT had included were false, and that they offered “misleading” statements to the court, for which reason he considers that they acted in bad faith
The togado considers that although there is “nothing inherently improper in the use of a reliable artificial intelligence tool as an assistant”, the regulations “impose a control function on lawyers to guarantee the accuracy of their statements.”
ChatGPT and non-existent judicial opinions
The judgment also underlines that both “relinquished their responsibilities when they presented non-existent court opinions accompanied by false quotes created by the artificial ChatGPT tool and continued to maintain those false opinions after court orders cast doubt on their existence.”
Both were working on a lawsuit against the airline Avianca filed by a passenger who claims he suffered an injury from being hit by a service cart during a flight.
Schwartz, who was representing the plaintiff, used ChatGPT to write a brief opposing a defense request to have the case dismissed.
In the ten-page document, the lawyer cited several judicial decisions to support his theses, but it was soon discovered that the well-known chatbot from the OpenAI company had invented them.
“The Court is facing an unprecedented situation. A filing submitted by plaintiff’s counsel in opposition to a motion to dismiss (the case) is replete with citations to non-existent cases,” Judge Kevin Castel wrote at the time.
Explanation of the lawyer
The lawyer himself presented an affidavit in which he admitted to having used ChatGPT to prepare the brief and acknowledged that the only verification he had carried out was to ask the application if the cases it cited were real.
Schwartz justified himself by assuring that he had never used a tool of this type before and that, therefore, “he was not aware of the possibility that its content could be false.”
The lawyer stressed that he had no intention of misleading the court and fully exonerated another lawyer from the firm who is also exposed to possible sanctions.
