A US federal judge has banned the use of AI-generated content from ChatGPT, Harvey.AI, and Google Bard in his courtroom. Texas federal judge Brantley Starr informed lawyers that any attorney participating in his court must attest that no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence, or if it was, it must have been checked by a human being. Judge Starr stated that these AI platforms, while powerful and useful in the law for tasks such as form divorces, discovery requests, suggested errors, and anticipated questions at oral argument, are not suitable for legal briefing, as they are prone to hallucinations and bias. According to Judge Kevin Castel, ChatGPT had fooled a lawyer into believing that bogus citations given in a case against Colombian airline Avianca were legitimate, while last month, ChatGPT falsely named an innocent and highly-respected law professor in the US as part of a research study on legal scholars who had sexually harassed students in the past.
ChatGPT is a chatbot designed for conversational applications through OpenAI, a research service that creates AI systems capable of producing human-like responses. Meanwhile, Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, was accused by ChatGPT as part of a research project on legal scholars who sexually harassed someone, which was later found to be incorrect.