From Ader v. Ader, decided last week by N.Y. trial court judge Joel M. Cohen:
This case adds yet another unfortunate chapter to the story of artificial intelligence misuse in the legal profession. Here, Defendants' counsel not only included an AI-hallucinated citation and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of this motion for sanctions, but also included multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in Defendants' brief opposing this motion. In other words, counsel relied upon unvetted AI—in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues—to defend his use of unvetted AI….
Plaintiff [had] identified inaccurate citations and quotations in Defendants' opposition brief that appeared to be "hallucinated" by an AI tool. After Plaintiff brought this issue to the Court's attention, Defendants submitted a surreply affirmation in which their counsel, without admitting or denying the use of AI, "acknowledge[d] that several passages were inadvertently enclosed in quotation" and "clarif[ied] that these passages were intended as paraphrases or summarized statements of the legal principles established in the cited authorities." Plaintiff then submitted a letter in rebuttal to the Surreply Affirmation, to which the Court invited Defendants to respond. Defendants did not respond.
As set forth in detail in the Rebuttal Letter and the papers in support of the instant motion, defense counsel's explanation of the citation and quotation errors as innocuous paraphrases of accurate legal principles does not hold water. Among other things, the purported "paraphrases" included bracketed terms to indicate departure from a quotation (not something one would expect to see in an intended paraphrase) and comments such as "citation omitted." Moreover, the cited cases often did not stand for the propositions quoted, were completely unrelated in subject matter, and in one instance did not exist at all.
