There’s a warning here somewhere for lawyers, officials, perhaps doctors and certainly students: anyone who as the part of his or her day submits written documents.
Don’t use ChatGPT.
That’s one conclusion after officials announced a 90-day suspension for a Colorado lawyer who submitted a motion to court that “cited case law that he found through the artificial intelligence platform, ChatGPT.”
The problem is that the lawyer, Zachariah C. Crabill, “did not read the cases he found … or otherwise attempt to verify that the citations were accurate.”
The software had given him case citations that either were “incorrect” or simply “fictitious.”
Legal columnist Eugene Volokh explained, “The presiding disciplinary judge approved the parties’ stipulation to discipline and suspended Zachariah C. Crabill (attorney registration number 56783) for one year and one day, with ninety days to be served and the remainder to be stayed upon Crabill’s successful completion of a two-year period of probation, with conditions.”
Crabill had been hired by a client to prepare a motion to set aside judgment in the client’s civil case. Crabill submitted the motion, after using ChatGPT, only to discover later that the cases were fake.
“But Crabill did not alert the court to the sham cases at the hearing. Nor did he withdraw the motion. When the judge expressed concerns about the accuracy of the cases, Crabill falsely attributed the mistakes to a legal intern. Six days after the hearing, Crabill filed an affidavit with the court, explaining that he used ChatGPT when he drafted the motion,” the report said.
That, the decision in the case ruled, amounted to a violation of a legal requirement that a lawyer competently represent a client.
It isn’t the first time such a catastrophe has developed. WND reported a few months ago a judge blasted a filing in federal court in Manhattan after discovering it was doctored by artificial intelligence and contained “bogus” information.”
As in “made-up” cases and citations.
The New York Post reported at the time the controversy is just the latest to involve AI, which has made abrupt tech advances in recent months, to the point experts are warning that its development needs to be paused for now.
The Post reported it was a lawyer from a “respected Tribeca firm” who conceded recently his filing “was written with the help of an artificial intelligence chatbot on his behalf.”
It was Steven Schwartz, who is with Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who admitted he asked ChatGPT to find cases relevant to his own case, “only for the bot to fabricate them entirely,” the report said.
The dispute was over a case filed by Schwartz’s partner, Paul LoDuca, against Avianca airlines on behalf of Robert Mata, who claimed an injury from a metal serving cart.
The airline asked the court to toss the action, and Schwartz “filed a brief that supposedly cited more than a half dozen relevant cases,” the report said.
But those cases, Miller v. United Airlines, Petersen v. Iran Air and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, and others were fabricated by ChatGPT, the report said.
IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Shortly after Hamas terrorists fired over 5,000 rockets from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and then proceeded to attack the Jewish state by land, sea and air – torturing, burning, beheading and murdering well over a thousand people, including women, children and infants, and wounding and abducting hundreds more – world reaction was, in its own way, almost equally shocking.
For after the biggest one-day mass slaughter of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, what followed was an outpouring of celebratory demonstrations, unbridled Jew-hatred, deliriously gleeful support for Hamas and bitter condemnation of the nation of Israel. Not just in the Arab-Muslim world, but throughout the Western world as well, including all across America.
Why? What is behind the explosion of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, pro-terror sentiment in the United States, where Israel has long been one of America’s closest friends and allies? Why are hordes of young “woke” LGBT demonstrators marching in support of Hamas – when Hamas wouldn’t think twice about binding and blindfolding them and throwing them off the roof of a tall building – as they routinely do in the Muslim world?
It turns out there’s one area of agreement that is so powerful, deep-seated and all-consuming that the vast differences between the deranged left and the murderous jihadists melt away into Kumbaya harmony.
All of this and much more is completely exposed in November’s issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled ISRAEL VS. GLOBAL JIHAD: How Jew-hatred, radical Islam and Leftism are pushing us toward World War III. Beyond a deeply insightful dive into why leftists are surging toward radical Islam – which hates and dreams of raping and butchering them – this Whistleblower issue includes fantastic articles by everyone from top Israeli analyst (and former Israel Defense Forces officer) Caroline Glick to Harvest Christian Fellowship’s Pastor Greg Laurie on the current war in Israel and biblical prophecies regarding the End Times … which he says are now upon us.
WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.
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