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4 months ago
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The Georgia Court of Appeals has tossed a state trial court's order because it relied on court cases that do not exist, presumably generated by an AI model.
The errant citations, the appeals court said, appear to have been "drafted using generative AI."
Judges have previously scolded lawyers for citing AI falsehoods in legal filings, but here they actually reversed a lower court's order.
The case involves wife Nimat Shahid's effort to challenge a divorce order granted to her husband Sufyan Esaam in July 2022. A lower court's decision in the case included citations fabricated by an AI model, and Shahid appealed.
The Georgia Court of Appeals found that phony cases were enough to vacate the trial court's order.
"We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court’s order," the appeals court said in its decision [PDF], which directs the lower court to revisit the wife's petition.
"As the reviewing court, we make no findings of fact as to how this impropriety occurred, observing only that the order purports to have been prepared by Husband's attorney, Diana Lynch."
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Trial judges often rely on attorneys to draft the proposed court orders. Lynch did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The appellate judges note that Lynch repeated the bogus citations in the trial court order to the appeals court and expanded upon them, even after Shahid had challenged the fictitious cases in the trial court's order. In total, the appeals court said Lynch's appeals briefs contained "11 bogus case citations out of 15 total, one of which was in support of a frivolous request for attorney fees."
The appeals court fined Lynch $2,500 as a penalty for filing a frivolous motion for attorney fees.
The appellate order cites a US Supreme Court report as a warning, noting:
At that point in time, Chief Justice Roberts presumably would have been aware of Mata v. Avianca, in which the plaintiff's attorneys were sanctioned for citing fake cases, and perhaps United States v. Hayes and United States v. Cohen, which also surfaced in 2023.
In the years since then, the uncritical use of AI has continued, in cases like Concord Music Group vs. Anthropic, Wadsworth v. Walmart, and Kohls et al v. Ellison, among others. At least 200 instances involving AI hallucinations in legal disputes have been documented. ®
