Lawyers could face ‘severe’ penalties for fake AI-generated citations, UK court warns

The High Court of England and Wales says that lawyers must take stronger measures to prevent the excessive use of artificial intelligence in their work.

In a decision Ending two recent cases, Judge Victoria Sharp wrote that generative AI tools like Chatgpt “are not able to conduct reliable legal research”.

“Such tools can produce apparently consistent and plausible responses to prompts, but these consistent and plausible responses can be entirely incorrect,” wrote Sharp. “Answers can make confident affirmations that are simply false.”

This does not mean that lawyers cannot use AI in their research, but she said that they had professional duty “to verify the accuracy of this research by reference to authority sources, before using it during their professional work”.

Sharp judge suggested that the growing number of cases where lawyers (including the American side, Lawyers representing the main platforms of AI) have cited what seems to be lies generated by AI suggests that “more things must be done to ensure that the advice is followed and that lawyers comply with their functions towards the court”, and she declared that her decision would be transmitted to professional bodies, including the bar and the bar.

In one of the cases in question, a lawyer representing a man asking for damages against two banks submitted a file to 45 quotes – 18 of these cases did not exist, while many others “did not contain the quotes assigned to them, did not support the proposals for which they were cited and had no relevance to the question of the request,” said Sharp judge.

In the other, a lawyer representing a man who had been expelled from his house in London wrote a legal file citing five cases which did not seem to exist. (The lawyer denied having used AI, although she said that the quotes can come from summaries generated by the AI ​​who appeared in “Google or Safari”.) Judge Sharp said that if the court had decided not to initiate the outrage procedure, it is “not a precedent”.

“Lawyers who do not comply with their professional obligations in this regard may risk risking severe sanction,” she added.

The two lawyers have been referred or have referred to professional regulators. Judge Sharp noted that when lawyers do not respect their functions towards the court, the courts of the court go from “public drafting” to the taxation of costs, outrage procedures or even “reference to the police”.