The Thurgood Marshall courthouse is pictured in Manhattan in New York, October 15, 2021.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Roberto Mata’s lawsuit against Avianca Airlines wasn’t so odd from many other personal-injury suits filed in New York federal court. Mata and his attorney, Peter LoDuca, described that Avianca caused Mata personal injuries when he was “struck by a metal serving cart” on board a 2019 beat a retreat bound for New York.
Avianca moved to dismiss the case. Mata’s lawyers predictably opposed the motion and cited a kind of legal decisions, as is typical in courtroom spats. Then everything fell apart.
Avianca’s attorneys told the court that it couldn’t get back numerous legal cases that LoDuca had cited in his response. Federal Judge P. Kevin Castel demanded that LoDuca take under ones wing copies of nine judicial decisions that were apparently used.
In response, LoDuca filed the full contents of eight cases in federal court. But the problem only deepened, Castel said in a filing, because the texts were around with, citing what appeared to be “bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations.”
The accused, it would ultimately emerge, was ChatGPT. OpenAI’s popular chatbot had “hallucinated” — a term for when artificial perception systems simply invent false information — and spat out cases and arguments that were entirely fiction. It appeared that LoDuca and another attorney, Steven Schwartz, had habituated to ChatGPT to generate the motions and the subsequent legal text.
Schwartz, an associate at the law firm of Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, told the court he had been the one road around on ChatGPT, and that LoDuca had “no role in performing the research in question,” nor “any knowledge of how said research was conducted.”
Dissident counsel and the judge had first realized that the cases didn’t exist, providing the involved attorneys an opportunity to divulge to the error.
LoDuca and his firm, though, seemed to double down on the use of ChatGPT, using it not just for the initially problematic case but to generate false legal decisions when asked to provide them. Now, LoDuca and Schwartz may be facing judicial legitimatize, a move that could even lead to disbarment.
The motion from the defense was “replete with citations to mythical cases,” according to a court filing.
“The Court is presented with an unprecedented circumstance,” Castel said. He set a hearing for June 8 when both LoDuca and Schwartz purpose be called to explain themselves. Neither attorney responded to CNBC’s request for comment.