in april, i wrote a warning in this space about the trendy ai application chatgpt, observing that in the age of the artificial-intelligence takeoff, we are relearning old lessons about the conjoined brilliance and stupidity of computers. readers my age who began fooling with personal computers in the 1980s probably remember initial feelings of power and promise as we plumbed the delights of basic or visicalc. they will also remember discovering how infuriatingly literalist and fussy computers are, and how they had absolutely no understanding what you were trying to accomplish at any given moment. one misplaced keystroke was always enough to make a program crash or a datafile disappear or a working algorithm start outputting garbage.
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and now, in december, i don’t know whether to be proud of this forecast — or disappointed that i didn’t think of all my lawyer friends who can’t wait to start farming out humdrum research tasks to the robots. in june, there was an early high-profile example in u.s. federal court, when some new york lawyers were fined by a judge for presenting hallucinatory “gibberish” full of made-up case references. chatgpt proved to be the ultimate culprit. and now something of the sort seems to have happened in a much more newsworthy setting involving michael d. cohen , a former lawyer for donald trump.
unfortunately for schwartz and cohen, u.s. district judge jesse furman double-checked the citations. if you’re a lawyer, you definitely ought to check out the result , if only in the spirit of someone buying a horror-movie ticket. “as far as the court can tell,” judge furman says tersely, “none of these cases exist.” the bibliographical pointers in the schwartz brief point zanily in many directions, none of them relevant. cohen has a new lawyer who also can’t track down the citations, which look too much like chatgpt hallucinations for anyone to ignore that possibility.
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