this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
464 points (98.9% liked)

Not The Onion

12561 readers
520 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, admitted to citing fake, AI-generated court cases in a legal document that wound up in front of a federal judge, as reported earlier by The New York Times. A filing unsealed on Friday says Cohen used Google’s Bard to perform research after mistaking it for “a super-charged search engine” rather than an AI chatbot.

I... don't even. I lack the words.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's the second time a lawyer has made this mistake, though the previous case wasn't at such a high level

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not even close to the second time. It's happening constantly but is getting missed.

Too many people think LLMs are accurate.

[–] FlashMobOfOne 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I work for a law firm, and yeah, this happens a lot. The stupidity and laziness of our clients' in-house attorneys is making us a lot of money.

[–] littlebluespark 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So, AI is... checks notes... making you a lot of money, by association?

[–] FlashMobOfOne 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] KGB 2 points 11 months ago

Hi there, Mr Specter.

[–] AA5B 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Why is there not an automated check for any cases referenced in a filing, or required links? It would be trivial to require a clear format or uniform cross-reference, and this looks like an easy niche for automation to improve the judicial system. I understand that you couldn’t interpret those cases or the relevance, but an existence check and links or it doesn’t count.

I assume that now it doesn’t happen unless the other side sys a paralegal for a few hours of research

[–] ridethisbike 1 points 11 months ago

I think the issue is we're still in pretty uncharted territory here. It'll take time for stuff like that to become the norm. That said... The lawyers should be doing those kind of checks anyways. They're idiots if they don't.