Lawyers Keep Failing Clients By Relying on A.I. ⇥ theguardian.com

Nicholas Chrastil, the Guardian:

State officials have praised Butler Snow for its experience in defending prison cases – and specifically William Lunsford, head of the constitutional and civil rights litigation practice group at the firm. But now the firm is facing sanctions by the federal judge overseeing Johnson’s case after an attorney at the firm, working with Lunsford, cited cases generated by artificial intelligence – which turned out not to exist.

It is one of a growing number of instances in which attorneys around the country have faced consequences for including false, AI-generated information in official legal filings. A database attempting to track the prevalence of the cases has identified 106 instances around the globe in which courts have found “AI hallucinations” in court documents.

The database is now up to 120 cases, including some fairly high-profile ones like that against Timothy Burke.

Here is a little behind-the-scenes from this weekend’s piece about “nimble fingers” and Apple’s supply chain. The claim, as framed by Tripp Mickle, in the New York Times, is that “[y]oung Chinese women have small fingers, and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts”. This sounded suspicious to me because I thought about it for five seconds. There are other countries where small objects are carefully assembled by hand, for example, and attributing a characteristic like “small fingers” to hundreds of millions of “young Chinese women” seems reductive, to put it mildly. But this assumption had to come from somewhere, especially since Patrick McGee also mentioned it.

So I used both DuckDuckGo and Google to search for relevant keywords within a date range of the last fifteen years and excluding the past month or so. I could not quickly find anything of relevance; both thought I was looking for smartphones for use with small hands. So I thought this might be a good time to try ChatGPT. It immediately returned a quote from a 2014 report from an international labour organization, but did not tell me the title of the report or give me a link. I asked it for the title. ChatGPT responded it was actually a 2012 report that mentioned “nimble fingers” of young women being valuable, and gave me the title. But when I found copies of the report, there was no such quote or anything remotely relevant. I did, however, get the phrase “nimble fingers”, which sent me down the correct search path to finding articles documenting this longstanding prejudice.

Whether because of time crunch or laziness, it baffles me how law firms charging as much as they do have repeatedly failed to verify the claims generated by artificial intelligence tools.