Two lawyers who cited bogus legal cases dreamed up by the AI chatbot ChatGPT were hit with a joint $5,000 fine on Thursday, representing the first significant sanctions in the legal profession stemming from the use of the software. New York District Judge P. Kevin Castel said in his decision that Steven Schwartz—the attorney who used the program—and his colleague Peter LoDuca had “consciously avoided” signs that the cases they were using were fake. Schwartz had been representing a man suing Avianca Airlines in a personal injury claim and submitted details of previous cases to show precedent—at least six of which turned out to have been made up by ChatGPT. Schwartz later said he was “mortified” to learn the cases were fake and claimed he hadn’t understood that ChatGPT “was not a search engine, but a generative language-processing tool.”
