Attorney Steven Schwartz heard about large language models (LLMs) from his children. He read a few articles on the subject, one saying that the new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots could make legal research obsolete.

Schwartz asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help him with the research for a lawsuit; he was representing an airline passenger who suffered injuries after being struck by a serving cart on a 2019 flight.

ChatGPT instantly summarized comparable cases, such as Martinez v. Delta Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines. Schwartz put them in his filing. Unfortunately for Schwartz, many cases—and even some airlines—didn’t exist

The defendant’s lawyers complained that they could not locate the cases cited. At first, Schwartz and another attorney at his firm gave “shifting and contradictory explanations.” Then Schwartz told the judge what had happened.

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Psychology Today
October 27, 2023