Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, admitted to citing fake, AI-generated court cases in a legal document that wound up in front of a federal judge, as reported earlier by The New York Times. A filing unsealed on Friday says Cohen used Google’s Bard to perform research after mistaking it for “a super-charged search engine” rather than an AI chatbot.

I… don’t even. I lack the words.

  • CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    That’s the second time a lawyer has made this mistake, though the previous case wasn’t at such a high level

    • huginn@feddit.it
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      10 months ago

      Not even close to the second time. It’s happening constantly but is getting missed.

      Too many people think LLMs are accurate.

      • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Problem is that these llm answers like this will find their way onto search engines like Google. Then it will be even more difficult to find real answers to questions.

        • ghurab@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Some LLMs are already generating answers based on other llm generated contant. We’ve gone full circle.

          I was using phind to get some information about edrum sensors, (not the intended usecase, but I was just messing around) and one of the sources was a very obvious AI generating article from a contant mill.

          Skynet is going to be so inbred

          • huginn@feddit.it
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            10 months ago

            Model collapse is going to be a big deal and it doesn’t take too much poisoned content to cause model collapse.

        • huginn@feddit.it
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          10 months ago

          Have found, not will find.

          There are so many spam sites with LLM content.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I work for a law firm, and yeah, this happens a lot. The stupidity and laziness of our clients’ in-house attorneys is making us a lot of money.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Why is there not an automated check for any cases referenced in a filing, or required links? It would be trivial to require a clear format or uniform cross-reference, and this looks like an easy niche for automation to improve the judicial system. I understand that you couldn’t interpret those cases or the relevance, but an existence check and links or it doesn’t count.

        I assume that now it doesn’t happen unless the other side sys a paralegal for a few hours of research

        • ridethisbike@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I think the issue is we’re still in pretty uncharted territory here. It’ll take time for stuff like that to become the norm. That said… The lawyers should be doing those kind of checks anyways. They’re idiots if they don’t.