California Woman Wins Court Case Using ChatGPT as Lawyer
A California woman successfully used AI tools, including ChatGPT, to overturn her eviction notice and avoid tens of thousands of dollars in fines over several months of litigation, Futurism reports.
As NBC News reports, Lynn White was behind on rent and initially lost a jury trial after being served with an eviction notice.
Instead of continuing to work with a local tenant advocacy network, she turned to ChatGPT and the AI research platform Perplexity to represent herself in court.
That’s almost always a bad idea. But according to NBC, the chatbot identified potential errors in a judge’s procedural rulings for White, informed her of what action to take, and drafted a response for the court.
“I can’t overstate the usefulness of AI in my case. I would never, never, never, never have won this appeal without AI,” she told the broadcaster.
White is one of several plaintiffs NBC spoke with who represented themselves with the help of AI and emerged victorious.
Another is Staci Dennett, the owner of a home fitness business in New Mexico, who used AI to successfully negotiate a settlement for unpaid debt.
“I would tell ChatGPT to pretend it was a Harvard Law professor and tear my arguments apart. Tear it apart until I got an A-plus on the job,” she told NBC.
The result was surprisingly convincing.
“If law is something you’re interested in as a profession, you can certainly do it,” opposing attorneys reportedly told her in an email.
However, the tools are not always successful in overturning decisions or winning legal cases.
AI tools are known for churning out fabricated and misleading information that can get a pro-self plaintiff into trouble — like energy drink mogul Jack Owoc, who was sanctioned in August after filing a motion filled with hallucinatory quotes.
Owoc was ordered to perform ten hours of community service, according to NBC.
Perhaps more troubling is that a growing number of professional lawyers have also been caught red-handed, filing briefs that include hallucinatory court cases, resulting in penalties and disgrace.
In one specific example, earlier this week, 404 Media reported that a New York lawyer who was caught using AI in court was later caught presenting an AI-generated explanation for his mistake.
“This case adds another unfortunate chapter to the history of the misuse of artificial intelligence in the legal profession,” the disappointed judge overseeing the case wrote in a harsh ruling.
In August, a California lawyer was fined a “historic” $10,000 for filing a lawsuit generated by artificial intelligence. Twenty-one of the 23 citations from the cases he cited were found to be fabricated.