A New York Lawyer is facing the consequences of using the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to carry out legal research for one of his clients. Steven Schwartz, a lawyer from Levidow, Levidow and Oberman, was representing a passenger Roberto Mata who was suing the company Avianca. Schwartz used the AI program to “supplement” research for a 10-page submission. In the legal brief, six previous alleged court cases were referenced but when Avianca’s lawyers couldn’t find them, Judge P Kevin Castel were forced to hold a hearing about the potential sanctions.
Developed by Silicon Valley scientists, ChatGPT is designed to mimic human conversation and language while drawing upon a wealth of knowledge to answer questions and solve problems. After it was revealed that the AI tool provided bogus court decisions and quotes, Schwartz filed an affidavite and admitted to using the tool to “supplement” his work. He clarified that he had no intent to deceive the court or the airline and assured the judge that he will not use the tool in the “future without absolute verification of its authenticity”.
OpenAI is a research laboratory based in San Francisco, California, which develops artificial intelligence technologies. Founded in 2018, the laboratory is led by Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman. OpenAI aims to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. OpenAI tackles complex problems in artificial intelligence, robotics, text understanding, reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, and other areas that require deep learning.
Steven Schwartz has worked as a lawyer for Levidow, Levidow and Oberman for several years. His most recent case is representing airline passenger, Roberto Mata, and suing the firm Avianca for an injury he sustained when a serving cart hit his knee during a flight from El Salvador to JFK Airport in New York in 2019. Schwartz used an AI program to “supplement” research for a 10-page submission to the Manhattan federal court. Unfortunately, this resulted in a sanction hearing to determine the consequences of his actions. Schwartz admitted to using ChatGPT for his research, and promised not to use the tool in the future without verification of it’s authenticity.
