ChatGPT Lawyers Are Ordered to Consider Seeking Forgiveness

A Manhattan judge on Thursday imposed a $5,000 fine on two lawyers who prepared a legal brief full of made-up cases and citations, all generated by the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT, and then submitted it in court.

The judge, P. Kevin Castel of Federal District Court, also harshly criticized the lawyers’ actions, and ordered them to send a copy of his opinion to each of the actual judges whose names appeared on the fake opinions produced by ChatGPT.

Judge Castel wrote that he would not require the lawyers, Steven A. Schwartz and Peter LoDuca, whom he referred to as respondents, to apologize to the judges whose names were on the fake opinions “because a compelled apology is not a sincere apology.”

“Any decision to apologize is left to the respondents,” the judge added.

The discovery of ChatGPT’s use in creating the brief in an otherwise unremarkable lawsuit in Manhattan reverberated throughout the legal profession. The revelation also riveted the tech community, where there has been a debate about the dangers of overreliance on artificial intelligence — even as a potential existential threat to humanity.

“Many harms flow from the submission of fake opinions,” the judge wrote. “The opposing party wastes time and money in exposing the deception. The court’s time is taken from other important endeavors.”

Judge Castel added that the lawyers’ action “promotes cynicism about the legal profession and the American judicial system. And a future litigant may be tempted to defy a judicial ruling by disingenuously claiming doubt about its authenticity.”

The ruling on Thursday followed a June 8 hearing at which Judge Castel grilled Mr. Schwartz and Mr. LoDuca about how they came to file the brief in the suit in which their client, Roberto Mata, seeks to hold the airline Avianca responsible for an injury he says he sustained when a metal serving cart hit his knee during an August 2019 flight from El Salvador to New York.

After Avianca asked to dismiss the suit because the statute of limitations had expired, Mr. Schwartz prepared a 10-page brief citing more than a half-dozen court decisions with names like Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines and Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines, to argue that the suit should be allowed to proceed.

Because Mr. Schwartz was not admitted to practice in Manhattan’s federal court, his partner, Mr. LoDuca became the lawyer of record and signed the brief, which was filed on March. 1.

Two weeks later, Avianca’s lawyers, Bart Banino and Marissa Lefland, replied that they were “unable to locate most of the case law” cited in the brief, and the few cases they could find “do not stand for the propositions for which they are cited.”

At the June 8 hearing, Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law for three decades, told the judge that he had used ChatGPT because his firm, Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, lacked a database with access to federal cases and he could not find what he needed on Google.

“I heard about this new site,” Mr. Schwartz said, “which I falsely assumed was, like, a super search engine.”

“I just never could imagine that ChatGPT would produce fabricated cases,” he said.