Lawyer uses ChatGPT in court and now has ‘great regret’ about it

A New York lawyer has been convicted of using ChatGPT for legal research as part of a lawsuit against a Colombian airline.

Steven Schwartz, an attorney with New York law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, was hired by Robert Mata to file a damages claim against Avianca Airlines.

According to a May 28 CNN Business report, Mata claims he was injured by a serving trolley during his 2019 flight with the airline.

However, after a judge noted inconsistencies and factual errors in the case’s documentation, Schwartz has now admitted to using ChatGPT for his legal investigation, according to a May 24 affidavit.

He claims this was his first time using ChatGPT for legal research and was “unaware of the possibility that its content could be counterfeit”.

In an April 5 trial, the judge presiding over the case stated:

“Six of the cases filed have been found to be false court decisions with false citations and false internal citations.”

The judge further claimed that certain cases referred to in the comments did not actually exist, and that there was a case where a docket number on a petition was switched with another court petition.

Schwartz said he also regrets trusting the artificial chatbot without conducting his own due diligence. The statement stated:

“Deeply regret that it has used generative artificial intelligence to supplement the legal research conducted herein and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity.”

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In recent times there has been an ongoing debate about the extent to which ChatGPT can be integrated into the workforce.

However, reports show that ChatGPT’s intelligence levels are increasing rapidly.

However, developers are skeptical about whether it indeed has the potential to completely replace humans.

Syed Ghazanfer, a blockchain developer, said that while he favors ChatGPT, he doubts it has the communication skills to fully replace human workers.

“In order to replace you, you have to communicate requirements that are not possible in native English speakers. That’s why we invented programming languages,” he said.

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