A set of lawyers have been fined $12,000 for using AI in their court documents, with a federal judge saying they submitted “hallucinated” material in court.
Artificial Intelligence has started playing a bigger role in a lot of people’s lives, with the likes of ChatGPT, Grok, and Copilot being used across the world daily. AI has increasingly become used in workplaces too, with it supposedly cutting down time on menial tasks.
It has, however, landed plenty of people in trouble, especially when it comes to the legal sector. A number of legal eagles have submitted documents to courts that have been debunked because AI has made up legal reasoning and precedents.
That has happened again in Kansas, with a federal judge handing out some hefty fines because of AI-generated details that ended up being fake.
$12k fines handed out to lawyers over AI materials
As per Reuters, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson fined a set of lawyers around $12,000 over the “hallucinated” materials.
“A reasonably competent attorney filing documents in court should be aware of the pronounced, well-publicized risks of using unverified generative AI for legal research and the ethical obligations associated with signing a court filing without checking it for accuracy,” the federal judge wrote in a report.
One lawyer, Sandeep Seth, was fine $5000 and called it an “embarrassing lesson.” He was dealt the biggest fine, with Kenneth Kula and Christopher Joe both being fined $3000.
Another counsellor, David Cooper, was fined $1000 over citations in the court documents.
“The sheer amount of case law that has erupted over the last few years due to attorneys’ reliance on unverified generative AI research, often generating hallucinated legal authority, is staggering,” Robinson added.
Over in Colorado, job applicants have actually filed a lawsuit against an AI company whose tool scanned their resumes and scored them on different fronts, as they want a bit more clarity on the data it holds.
