Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases
Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases
Another lawyer was caught using AI and not checking the output for accuracy, while a previously-reported case just got hit with sanctions.
But the explanation and Ramirez’s promise to educate himself on the use of AI wasn’t enough, and the judge chided him for not doing his research before filing. “It is abundantly clear that Mr. Ramirez did not make the requisite reasonable inquiry into the law. Had he expended even minimal effort to do so, he would have discovered that the AI-generated cases do not exist. That the AI-generated excerpts appeared valid to Mr. Ramirez does not relieve him of his duty to conduct a reasonable inquiry,” Judge Dinsmore continued, before recommending that Ramirez be sanctioned for $15,000.
Falling victim to this a year or more after the first guy made headlines for the same is just stupidity.
Works tirelessly? No, AI here!
Nice all the work that the lawyers saved will be offset by judges having to verify all the cases cited
No, lazyness.
I’m all for lawyers using AI, but that’s because I’m also all for them getting punished for every single incorrect thing they bring forward if they do not verify.
That is the problem with AI, if I have to check the output is valid then what's the damn point?
Shareholder value. Thimg of all the new 2nd and 3rd yatchs they can buy now
It's actually often easier to check an answer than coming up with an answer. Finding the square root of 66564 by hand isn't easy, but checking if the answer is 257 is simple enough.
So, in principle, if the AI is better at guessing an answer than we are, it might still be useful. But it depends on the cost of guessing and the cost of checking.
Because AI is better than humans and finding relevant court cases. If you are a lawyer and you cite a court case that you didn't even verify it exists you deserve that sanction and more.
You can get ideas, different approaches and concepts. Sort of rubber ducky thing in my case. It won't solve the problem for me, but might hint me in the right direction.
"Why don't we build another AI to fix the mistakes?"
I require $100 million funding for this though
Hold them in contempt. Put them in jail for a few days, then declare a mistrial due to incompetent counsel. For repeat offenders, file a formal complaint to the state bar.
From the linked court document in the article: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.insd.215482/gov.uscourts.insd.215482.99.0.pdf?ref=404media.co
"For the reasons set forth above, the Undersigned, in his discretion, hereby RECOMMENDS that Mr. Ramirez be personally SANCTIONED in the amount of $15,000 pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 for submitting to the Court and opposing counsel, on three separate occasions, briefs that contained citations to non-existent cases. In addition, the Undersigned REFERS the matter of Mr. Ramirez's misconduct in this case to the Chief Judge pursuant to Local Rule of Disciplinary Enforcement 2(a) for consideration of any further discipline that may be appropriate"
Mr. Ramirez is the dumbass lawyer that didn't check his dumbass AI. If you read above the paragraph I copied from, he gets laid into by the judge in writing to justify recommendation for sanctions and discipline. Good catch by the judge and the processes they have for this kind of thing.
Haven't people already been disbarred over this? Turning in unvetted AI slop should get you fired from any job.
Immediately there should be a contempt charge for disrespecting the Court.
Different jurisdiction
I heard turning in AI Slop worked out pretty well for Arcane Season 2 writers.
Great news for defendants though. I hope at my next trial I look over at the prosecutor's screen and they're reading off ChatGPT lmao
So long as your own lawyer isn't doing the same, of course :)
I represent myself in all my cases :)
“Mr. Ramirez explained that he had used AI before to assist with legal matters, such as drafting agreements, and did not know that AI was capable of generating fictitious cases and citations,” Judge Dinsmore wrote in court documents filed last week.
Jesus Christ, y'all. It's like Boomers trying to figure out the internet all over again. Just because AI (probably) can't lie doesn't mean it can't be earnestly wrong. It's not some magical fact machine; it's fancy predictive text.
It will be a truly scary time if people like Ramirez become judges one day and have forgotten how or why it's important to check people's sources yourself, robot or not.
AI, specifically Laege language Models, do not “lie” or tell “the truth”. They are statistical models and work out, based on the prompt you feed them, what a reasonable sounding response would be.
This is why they’re uncreative and they “hallucinate”. It’s not thinking about your question and answering it, it’s calculating what words will placate you, using a calculation that runs on a computer the size of AWS.
Don't need something the size of AWS these days. I ran one on my PC last week. But yeah, you're right otherwise.
No probably about it, it definitely can't lie. Lying requires knowledge and intent, and GPTs are just text generators that have neither.
I'm G P T and I cannot lie.
You other brothers use 'AI'
But when you file a case
To the judge's face
And say, "made mistakes? Not I!"
He'll be mad!A bit out of context my you recall me of some thinking I heard recently about lying vs. bullshitting.
Lying, as you said, requires quite a lot of energy : you need an idea of what the truth is and you engage yourself in a long-term struggle to maintain your lie and keep it coherent as the world goes on.
Bullshit on the other hand is much more accessible : you just have to say things and never look back on them. It's very easy to pile a ton of them and it's much harder to attack you about any of them because they're much less consequent.
So in that view, a bullshitter doesn't give any shit about the truth, while a liar is a bit more "noble". 0
It can and will lie. It has admitted to doing so after I probed it long enough about the things it was telling me.
Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doesn't know how it will end, and therefore can't have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I'd go further and claim it can't really "have an opinion" about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.
"Admitting" that it's lying only proves that it has been exposed to "admission" as a pattern in its training data.
You can't ask it about itself because it has no internal model of self and is just basing any answer on data in its training set
You don't need any knowledge of computers to understand how big of a deal it would be if we actually built a reliable fact machine. For me the only possible explanation is to not care enough to try and think about it for a second.
That's fundamentally impossible. There's always some baseline you trust that decides what is true
We did, a long time ago. It's called an encyclopedia.
If humans can't be trusted to only provide facts, how can we be trusted to make a machine that only provides facts? How do we deal with disputed truths? Grey areas?
We actually did. Trouble being you need experts to feed and update the thing, which works when you're watching dams (that doesn't need to be updated) but fails in e.g. medicine. But during the brief time where those systems were up to date they did some astonishing stuff, they were plugged into the diagnosis loop and would suggest additional tests to doctors, countering organisational blindness. Law is an even more complex matter though because applying it requires an unbounded amount of real-world and not just expert knowledge, so forget it.
Its actually been proven that AI can and will lie. When given a ability to cheat a task and the instructions not to use it. It will use the tool and fully deny doing so.
Edit:
Not sure why the downvotes because when i say proven i mean the research has been done and the results have been known for while
I don't know if I would call it lying per-se, but yes I have seen instances of AI's being told not to use a specific tool and them using them anyways, Neuro-sama comes to mind. I think in those cases it is mostly the front end agreeing not to lie (as that is what it determines the operator would want to hear) but having no means to actually control the other functions going on.
It's cool, they'll just have an AI source checker. :)
I call mine a brain! 😉
I hate people can even try to blame AI.
If I typo a couple extra zeroes because my laptop sucks, that doesn't mean I didn't fuck up. I fucked up because of a tool I was using, but I was still the human using that tool.
This is no different.
If a lawyer submits something to court that is fraudulent I don't give a shit if he wrote it on a notepad or told the AI on his phone browser to do it.
He submitted it.
Start yanking law licenses and these lawyers will start re-evaluating if AI means they can fire all their human assistants and take on even more cases.
Stop acting like this shit is autonomous tools that strip responsibility from decisions, that's literally how Elmo is about to literally dismantle our federal government.
And they're 100% gonna blame the AI too.
I'm honestly surprised they haven't claimed DOGE is run by AI yet
Exactly. If you want to use AI for something, cool, but you own the results. You can try suing the AI company for bad output, but you can't use the AI as an excuse to get out of negative consequences for something you are expected to do.
In this case he got caught because smart judge without IA. In a few years the new generation of judges will also rely on AI, so basically AI will rule the cases and own the judicial system.
But I was hysterically assured that AI was going to take all our jobs?
you sound like those republicans that mocked global warming when it snowed in Texas.
sure, won't take your job today. in a decade? probably.
Going off the math and charts that OpenAI and DeepMind both published before the AI boom which correctly guessed performance to cost ratios of ChatGPT4: we've reached the peak of current models. AI is bust, mate. In particular, Deepmind concluded with infinite resources the models in use would never reach accurate human language capabilities.
You can say stuff like "they'll just make new models, then!" but it doesn't really work like that, the current models aren't even new in the slightest it's just the first time we've gotten people together to feed them power and data like logs into a woodchipper.
The judge wrote that he “does not aim to suggest that AI is inherently bad or that its use by lawyers should be forbidden,” and noted that he’s a vocal advocate for the use of technology in the legal profession. “Nevertheless, much like a chain saw or other useful [but] potentially dangerous tools, one must understand the tools they are using and use those tools with caution,” he wrote. “It should go without saying that any use of artificial intelligence must be consistent with counsel's ethical and professional obligations. In other words, the use of artificial intelligence must be accompanied by the application of actual intelligence in its execution.”
I won't even go that far. I can very much believe that you can build an AI capable of doing perfectly-reasonable legal arguments. Might be using technology that looks a lot different from what we have today, but whatever.
The problem is that the lawyer just started using a new technology to produce material that he didn't even validate, without determining whether-or-not it actually worked for what he wanted to do in its current state, and where there was clearly available material showing that it was not in that state.
It's as if a shipbuilder started using random new substance in its ship hull without actually conducting serious tests on it or even looking at consensus in the shipbuilding industry as to whether the material could fill that role. Meanwhile, the substance is slowly dissolving in water. Just slapped it in the hull and sold it to the customer.
EDIT: Hmm. Actually, I thought that the judge was saying that the lawyer needed to use AI-generated stuff in a human-guided role, but upon consideration, I may in fact be violently agreeing with the judge. "Actual intelligence" may simply refer to what I'm saying that the lawyer should have done.
It’s as if a shipbuilder started using random new substance in its ship hull without actually conducting serious tests on it or even looking at consensus in the shipbuilding industry as to whether the material could fill that role. Meanwhile, the substance is slowly dissolving in water. Just slapped it in the hull and sold it to the customer.
But this is exactly what AI is being marketed toward. All of Apple's AI ads showcase dumb people who appear smart because the AI bails out their ineptitude.
I've been saying this for ages. Even as someone who's more-or-less against the current implementation of AI, I think people who truly believe in AI should be fighting the hardest against bad uses of it. It gives AI a worse black eye every time something like this happens.
Yeah he basically called the lawyer an idiot. 😆
Why would one even get the idea to use AI for something like this?
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."
All you do is a quick search on the case to see if it's real or not.
They bill enough each hour to get some interns to do this all day.
All you do is a quick search on the case to see if it’s real or not.
You could easily. We have resources such as LexusNexus or Westlaw which your firm should be paying for. Even searching on Google Scholar should be enough to verify. Stay away from Casetext though, it's new and mostly AI. LN and WL also have AI integration but it's not forced, you're still capable of doing your own research.
I've been telling people this for a while, but everyone needs to treat AI like how we used to treat the wiki. It's a good secondary source that can be used to find other more reliable sources, but it should never be used as your single standalone source.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it, AI is being forced everywhere you look and it is getting a bit difficult to get away from it, but it hasn't taken over everything to the point where there is no longer any personal responsibility. People need to have some common sense and double check everything as they've been taught to do even before AI.
I'm pretty sure that just doing "quick searches" is exactly how he ended up with AI answers to begin with.
I don't think PACER or the state equivalents use AI summary tools yet.
Cut the guy some slack. Instead of trying to put him in jail, bring AI front and center and try to use it in a methodical way...where does it help? How can this failure be prevented?
It can be prevented by people paid 400-1000 per hour spending time either writing own paperwork or paying others to actually write it.
LLMs are incapable of helping. If he cannot find time to construct his own legal briefs, maybe he should use part of his money to hire an AGI (otherwise known as a human) to help him.
Sure. Look llms should be able to help, but only if there's a human to bring meaning. Llms are basically... What's that word.. I'm thinking about it at the tip of my tongue.... Word completion engines. So you think something up and it tells you what might be next. Its not how brains work but its like a calculator is to numbers...a tool. Just learn how to use it for a purpose rather than leat it barf out and answer.