In today’s column, I examine an intriguing and perhaps abrasive question that some are starting to ask about the nonstop barrage of lawyers blaming AI for generating AI hallucinated citations and quotations as part of their legal filings.
The pointed question is this:
- Might it be that some of these instances of errors and sloppiness in such legal filings are due to human lawyers being lax, either by design or by accident, and they end up crafting unsubstantiated quotes and citations by their own human hand, hoping they won’t get caught, and if they do get caught, they can simply and connivingly say that AI did it?
Please note that this is not an indication that the lawyer failed to double-check AI hallucinated content. This supposition is that they didn’t use AI at all. The crux is that there are some lawyers who, when in a rush to file required documents, find themselves pressed for time. They then handcraft quotations that they assume are good enough, and they take a stab at citations that they think will look just about right.
Of course, this would be an egregious violation of their legal duties. It is inconceivable that a lawyer would take that kind of legal death knell chance (perhaps “inconceivable” in The Prince Bride kind of way). The counterargument is that they might be willing to do so if they strongly believed that they had a get-out-of-jail-free card, namely, to merely blame it on AI.
AI becomes the perfect patsy, the best possible excuse. Everyone nowadays clearly knows that AI hallucinates. It’s in blaring headlines constantly. Everybody accepts that it is hard to know when AI has hallucinated. Those darned contraptions will do all kinds of crazy things.
You see, this creates an ideal landscape to shrug off the fact that AI is plaguing lawyers right and left. It’s a new norm. In that sense, human errors can be recast as AI errors. AI becomes the ideal smokescreen. Just invoke the specter of AI, if needed, take your mild lumps, get sympathy that it could happen to anyone, and move on with your day.
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