The Law Society Gazette has recently reported on an unrepresented party to Court proceedings in Manchester that tried the original step of using Chat GPT as a substitute for proper legal advice.
During the course of the trial, the barrister instructed by the represented party argued that there was no precedent for the argument advanced by the unrepresented party. The unrepresented party returned to Court the following day with the names of four cases that he claimed supported his position. When these cases were analysed by the opposing barrister, he discovered that one of the cases was completely fictitious (both in name and the purported excerpt from the judgment) and the other three were the names of real cases but that the excerpts purportedly extracted from the judgments were also fictitious.
Making false submissions to a Court could be considered to be Contempt of Court, which is a criminal offence that, in more serious cases, could result in a prison sentence. The Judge, therefore, pressed the unrepresented party for confirmation as to his reasons for submitting this information to the Court. The unrepresented party admitted to using Chat GPT to find the authorities that he had tried to rely upon. It appears that Chat GPT delved into a bank of cases and created excerpts that fit with the user’s requirements but without any safeguards in place to determine if they were real or fictitious.
Comment
As matters stand therefore this case should stand as a clear warning to unrepresented parties that websites such as Chat GPT are not yet at a stage where they are infallible and should not be used as a substitute for proper legal advice. The unrepresented party was not prosecuted for the error as the Judge accepted that it was an inadvertent error. As the fallibility of AI programs becomes more widely known and accepted, there is no guarantee that Judges in the future will accept that future mistakes of a similar nature were inadvertent and accordingly, there may well be prosecutions in such circumstances.
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