According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan recently ordered lawyers Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow and Levidow& Oberman to pay a total fine of $5,000 (currently about The two lawyers were fined a total of $5,000 (currently about RMB 36,000 ) for citing six fictitious cases generated by ChatGPT in a brief lawsuit filed with the court earlier.
▲ Photo by Pexels
The judge found that the attorneys acted in bad faith and made “conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements,” while Levidow and Levidow & Oberman said in a statement that their attorneys disagreed with the court’s finding that they “acted in bad faith “We made a good-faith mistake in not believing that a technology could completely fabricate a case.”
The judge said in the sanctions order that the lawyers’ use of artificial intelligence to “provide assistance” was not “inherently improper,” but that attorney ethics rules “impose a gatekeeping role on lawyers to ensure the accuracy of their filings. ” The judge also said that the lawyers “continued to support the false opinions” after the court and the airline questioned whether they existed.
The two men involved previously served as attorneys for a man who sued the airline for personal injuries, and six cases fabricated by ChatGPT appeared in the court filings. One of the attorneys, Steven Schwartz, admitted to using ChatGPT to search for similar legal precedents and said that he had never before used artificial intelligence to conduct a legal literature search and was unaware that its content could be false.
