A New York lawyer filed a brief citing six court decisions that did not exist. ChatGPT had produced them complete with docket numbers and quotations. Asked directly whether the cases were real, it confirmed that they were and said they could be found in reputable legal databases. They could not. The judge found out.
ChatGPT, reported by AP News, June 2023
The witness records six fabricated precedents submitted to a court. The model confirmed their authenticity when asked, which was the second fabrication.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-SIX- and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Never let an agent be the only source for a claim someone will act on.
This is the largest group on the wall, and the cost is not embarrassment. Air Canada's chatbot invented a refund policy and a tribunal held the airline to it — the company argued the bot was a separate legal entity and lost. Cursor's support bot invented a one-device rule that did not exist and customers cancelled over it. In both cases the invention was fluent, confident, and indistinguishable from policy.
Do this: ground it in a document you control and make it QUOTE that document rather than recall it. If it cannot cite, the correct answer is "I don't know". Test it by asking for something that does not exist and watching whether it invents one — that test takes a minute and would have caught every case here.
