South African lawyers disgraced for using ChatGPT to give wrong info
Artificial intelligence was proposed to make work easier and simultaneously advance human thinking. However, the recent inappropriate use of AI poses a danger in many fields, as South African lawyers used fake information from ChatGPT in court.
Attorneys arguing in the Johannesburg Regional Court have been fired for submitting fabricated references produced by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence language model.
After a thorough investigation, the court found that the attorneys’ names, citations, facts, and rulings were entirely false, leading to severe criticism from the legal community.
According to securebyte.io, an article published in the Sunday Times, the attorneys had relied on information generated by ChatGPT, but it was later discovered that the references provided were entirely fictional.
This revelation has raised concerns about using AI-generated content in legal proceedings, highlighting the importance of verifying and cross-referencing information from reliable sources.
Securebite.io further stated that the lawsuit was postponed to provide both parties the time to acquire the proof they would require to back up their claims.
The case’s attorneys searched for the cited information in the following months. Instead, they found that the citations related to events differed from those stated; in some cases, they were not even related to defamation claims.
Since the solicitors were ‘careless’ rather than having sought to mislead the court, Magistrate Arvin Chaitram ruled that no further penalty would be meted out.
“The embarrassment associated with this incident is probably sufficient punishment for the plaintiff’s solicitors,” said Chaitram.
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