@rcpierce Amazing to me that folks still use 'hallucinate' to describe programming that was created to obfuscate and fool people. This is literally what it was designed to do. It's not hallucinated, it's working as intended.
Tech bros and other emotionally stunted profiteers want to be able to keep harming people and hope you'll go on thinking of these kinds of news stories as aberrations. They are not.
@rcpierce@law These attorneys are not being sanctioned for using AI as a tool, but because they were sloppy and lazy, submitting cases to the court w/o bothering to review them to ensure they even exist, much less to verify they stand for the proposition for which they were cited.
AI doesn't create bad lawyering - it reveals it. If these lawyers were not being sanctioned for made-up cases, they'd probably be facing discipline for other mistakes caused by that same level of carelessness.
@rcpierce as a profession, we appear to have a lot of work processes that assume there is no garbage in, so we don’t do a lot of checking to see if garbage is going out, apparently?
@rcpierce@law Shouldn't be a significant problem at this stage, because anyone doing due diligence will get a copy of the cited case before putting it to court.
The real problem will arise when one of these systems is capable of producing a plausible looking full case report...
@HighlandLawyer@law Even then, they'd have to get it published by the likes of Westlaw or Lexis here in the US. Vast majority of our courts have access and would be able to verify.
@rcpierce@law Here (Scotland) it's generally required to lodge copies of ones authorities (except in small claims). That may be from Westlaw, Lexis, Bailli, ScotCourt, etc, or old school copied from printed reports which might be in a more obscure publication- but those might have been scanned into a system so the lawyer is relying on a scan not an actual book/periodical.
So if a plausible looking report can be generated a lawyer might reasonably lodge that, & only find it is a fake later on.
@HighlandLawyer@law Yeah that makes sense if you have to lodge them that way. I guess the bigger issue would be fabricated evidence. I had a series of cases with the same guy representing himself and he constantly fabricated paper evidence (he had a legitimate mental condition). It was easy to spot, but maybe now, not so much. 🤷♂️
@rcpierce@law Seriously we are heading to a stage where we might need to revert to film photography for evidential purposes, just to be able to show, yes here is a physical negative which chemically reacted with light from the scene, rather than being computer generated ab initio, or modified by the digital camera when the image was made at the scene.
@HighlandLawyer@rcpierce@law We don't have a similar requirement here in the US, aside from unpublished cases (or possibly some "local rules" that individual judges might have), hence the problem - lawyers aren't checking citations before submitting to court. **Edited: And of course by "unpublished" I mean as in cases "Not For Publication Without The Approval Of The Appellate Division," not "fraudulently hallucinated by a GPT."
@markheftler@rcpierce@law Something that was always drummed into us at uni: read the case before you cite it; not a summary, not a textbook explanation, the actual reported case.
@rcpierce@law I’m consistently surprised that I’m surprised by how poorly some lawyers lawyer. I want to have more faith in my colleagues, but stuff like this…day-yam.
@markheftler@law Makes me wonder if the newest editions of The Bluebook have a section on citing from AI. I guess there needs to be. Any law students or professors out there know?
@petealexharris@rcpierce@law Maybe - but not in the first instance. Our Rules of Professional Conduct are quite clear on the matter: "A lawyer shall not knowingly ... make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal or fail to correct a false statement of material fact or law previously made to the tribunal by the lawyer." The onus is first on the attorney to, you know, not lie to the court about whether legal authorities exist or not.
@rcpierce@law The six-fingered judge in the image is a nice touch. Man I hate this stuff (even though I have a bunch of clients building stuff with it 😅).
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