Steven Schwartz, who used ChatGPT to write a legal brief, is pictured outside federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, June 8, 2023, in New York.
Molly Crane-Newman | New York Daily News | Getty Images
A New York federal judge on Thursday sanctioned lawyers who submitted a legal brief written by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, which included citations of non-existent court cases and fake quotes.
Judge P. Kevin Castel said that the attorneys, Peter LoDuca and Steven Schwartz, “abandoned their responsibilities” when they submitted the A.I.-written brief, and “then continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question.”
Castel ordered both LoDuca and Schwartz, along with their Levidow law firm, to each pay $5,000 in fines. He also ordered them to notify each judge falsely identified as the author of the bogus case rulings about the sanction.
Castel said he might not have punished them if attorneys if they had come “clean” about using ChatGPT to find the purported cases the A.I. cited.
But Castel said the lawyers exhibited “bad faith” by making false and misleading statements about the brief and its contents.
“In researching and drafting court submissions, good lawyers appropriately obtain assistance from junior lawyers, law students, contract lawyers, legal encyclopedias and databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis,” Castel wrote in his order in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
“Technological advances are commonplace and there isnothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” Castel wrote. “But existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”
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