Lawyer Fined $10,000 Over AI Hallucinated Legal Brief

Another lawyer has gotten in trouble over fake citations found in a legal brief. This time, it happened in Oregon.

Here on Freezenet, we have developed a bit of a tradition of just counting all the ways AI has burned people who thought that they could just leave all of their work to AI. Admittedly, I can’t help but picture the outcome being similar to an episode of The Simpsons where Homer leaves a nodding bird to press “Y” on a keyboard all day long so that the nuclear power plant can continue running without him being present. When something goes wrong, he goes on to get angry and start strangling the object in frustration. This as he blames the object for letting the problem happen in the first place. I can’t help but picture some of the incidences involving a similar moment like that where someone is frustratingly saying “stupid AI! I should never have left you in charge in the first place!”

Personally, I find it more hilarious than stupid simply because of how AI – at least of the generative kind – is so frequently promoted as something that would practically replace people’s jobs all day long. Some even go so far as to say how it’s basically the next industrial revolution and that we should prepare for a world without work because AI is going to be doing it all soon. When those predictions for this happening by the end of 2023, 2024, and 2025 failed to come to fruition, the prediction was then revised to by the end of 2026. This with the excuse that AI is totally rapidly improving and it’s something that’s going to happen any day now… aaaaany daaay now!

With people continuing to believe this obvious nonsense, it became a blessing in disguise for us here on Freezenet as we just keep tacking on examples of AI burning people. Those examples include lawyers getting in trouble for fake AI inserted citations in legal briefs, the CNET scandal, the Gannet Scandal, bad “journalism” predictions, fake news stories, more fake stories, Google recommending people eating rocks, the 15% success rate story, bad chess tactics, the Chicago Sun-Times scandal, a Canadian team submitting fake legal citations in their legal briefs, other attorneys submitting fake citation filled legal documents, the 91% failure rate story, AI deleting user data, the lawyer who got fined $10,000 over a bogus AI written legal brief, AI killing workplace productivity with workslop, AI having an 81% failure rate in summarizing news content, AI Overview giving out bad health advice, AI only being able to successfully complete 2.5% of commission work successfully at best, AI slowing software development down by 19%, AI hallucinating in even more court documents, AI being bad at poker, AI slop flooding the scientific community, AI causing a surge in medical mistakes, AI causing the Amazon outage by deleting the code environment, AI leading to burnout, Amazon getting burned by AI, and Canadian immigration documents getting wrongly rejected due to AI hallucinations.

Recently, I uncovered yet another instance of AI burning someone who left it all to AI. Once again, it is a lawyer that got in trouble. From KOIN6:

An Oregon lawyer will pay thousands of dollars after he signed his name to a legal brief containing made-up information that was generated by an artificial intelligence tool.

The appellate court ordered Salem-based attorney Bill Ghiorso to pay $10,000 in an opinion filed March 18 after they found his opening brief that included multiple fabrications.

The brief contact featured 15 citations and nine quotes “that had been contrived from thin air,” as first reported by the Oregonian.

Ghiorso said that when the brief was filed, he was suffering from serious health issues. As a result, he said he had delegated some legal research to his staff and did not personally verify the material.

What is interesting is that this is becoming one of the most common ways in which AI is getting people into trouble: Fake AI citations in legal briefs. At first, it was just warnings being handed out, but increasingly, I’m seeing judges hand out fines because some lawyers just aren’t getting the message that you shouldn’t leave it to AI to write your legal briefs. Who would’ve thought fines needed to get handed out to get that message through? Coincidentally, as I noted above, a California lawyer was also fined $10,000 for a similar screw up.

At any rate, this is just yet another piece of evidence to throw onto the pile of examples of why you shouldn’t leave things to AI. As long as there are people saying that AI is taking over everything, and gullible media outlets believing them and republishing those wild claims without fact checking (you know, because it’s not as though fact-checking is something that some of them do any more), then there are fools that will see those stories pop up and believe that they can leave it up to AI. So, I guess I’ll just sit here and continue to count all the ways people leaving it all to AI are getting burned by such a decision. After all, it’s only a matter of time before another story pops up detailing exactly that.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.