Another Legal Council Finds Out Why AI Written Legal Briefs Suck

It just keeps happening. A legal defence team decided to leave writing their legal brief to AI. The obvious ensues.

Some stories I end up writing about are new and novel. It can require a good chunk of research to figure it all out because, well, it feels like I’m on a new adventure every day at times. Other times, it feels like I’m re-writing the same story over and over and over again. In this case, it’s the latter.

One of the narratives I regularly see about AI is that it’s taking over jobs already, causing a jobs shortage (even though there has been an effective jobs shortage for decades here in Canada and no one wanted to acknowledge it because companies were pushing the narrative of a “skills shortage” which doesn’t exist). Other narratives more generally talk about how AI is practically perfected and is taking over the world and people are left with the tough choice of working with the tsunami of AI or engage in a futile attempt to fight against it.

Yet, despite the narratives I see, reality continues to paint a very different picture. As I’ve explained many times over, text based generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is designed to write something that sounds like it was written by a human. In fact, that’s the whole point and why they are called “chat bots” in the first place. For a number of those AI programs, the idea was to allow people to chat with the AI to feel less lonely. Things like sarcasm and truth are foreign concepts to these Large Language Models (LLMs) which is partly why so many of them make stuff up when they don’t know the answer (AKA “hallucinations”).

For too many people out there, however, they insist that AI is somehow infallible and will use AI in a way that basically does all the work with only minimal human effort. There’s a term for this kind of behaviour: idiocy. People will continue to firmly believe that AI is already perfect and will continue to just let AI do all the writing without bothering to check any of the output over afterwards, submitting that content as their own. This has me regularly referring to the famous internet term, “FAFO” (Fuck Around and Find Out). The “FA” part are people who just go ahead and let AI do all of their work. The “FO” part? Yeah, it continues to provide an endless supply of material to write about.

Examples of people experiencing the “Find Out” phase include fake legal citations in a legal brief, the CNET Scandal, the Gannet scandal, bad journalism “predictions”, fake news stories, more fake news stories, Google recommending people to eat rocks, the 15% success rate story, bad chess tactics, the Chicago-Sun fiasco, and more recently, a Canadian legal team getting in trouble with a judge over fake legal citations.

Yet, despite all of that, the narrative continues to be that AI has taken over the world as we speak and it’s already surpassing human capabilities. Headlines like “AI is changing the world faster than most realize“, “Indeed, Glassdoor to cut 1,300 jobs amid AI integration, memo shows“, and “Is A.I. the Future of Web Browsing?“. So, the mythology that AI chat bots are bringing about a new industrial revolution is alive and well despite all of the evidence pointing to the fact that AI is far from the point of being able to adequately replace human beings.

This is likely going to be something to continue to play out for a long time to come. The push by many outlets to say that AI is taking over the world and morons out there will continue to fall for that narrative. Recently, I came across another fun example of this. “My Pillow” guy, Mike Lindell is currently fighting a defamation case brought against him. Lindell’s legal council apparently decided to get AI to write their legal brief in the case. They submitted it to the judge. Unsurprisingly, the brief contained errors and fake citations (as so many other briefs written by AI have done in the past). The judge, understandably, was not happy with the situation and wound up, well, giving them a slap on the wrist for their stupidity. From The Economic Times (Via MSN):

A federal judge fined Mike Lindell’s lawyers because they used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help write court documents that included fake legal cases and wrong quotes. The lawyers Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster filed a motion on Feb 25 that had almost 30 wrong or fake citations, says reports.

This case is part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems executive. Coomer claimed Lindell spread lies that he helped rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump, as per the report by USA Today.

Kachouroff claimed the document with errors was a draft that got filed by mistake, but the judge noted that even his “final” version still had major errors. The judge said the lawyers’ actions weren’t just a simple mistake because of their contradictory statements and no proof to back their claims.

The judge said this situation showed either AI misuse or total carelessness by the lawyers. Each lawyer was fined $3,000 as a punishment and a warning. Judge Wang said she didn’t enjoy punishing lawyers, but this was the least serious penalty possible to make sure it doesn’t happen again, as per the report by USA Today.

The only way I can visualize the fine being reasonable is if this was the first offence on the part of the lawyers. Otherwise, I’m not sure if that fine is enough to deter other lawyers from trying to pass off AI written legal briefs as their own.

Still, it goes without saying how monumentally stupid it is for a lawyer to let a chat bot write their AI and just hand it in to the judge afterwards, thinking that the work is done in the best possible way. It’s kind of remarkable that there are lawyers out there who still think this sort of thing is a good idea. Still, as long as the narratives continue to get pushed that AI is practically perfected technology, there will no doubt be others inspired by the reports to give it a shot and enter an increasingly long list of people who enter the “find out” phase when they invariably get busted. It certainly grants me endless material to write about.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.