Thankyou Roll on Friday.
It seems only fair to head this story with an AI generated image
The Crown Prosecution Service has apologised after citing AI-hallucinated cases in its submissions to court.
CPS lawyers outsourced their brain to AI while responding to an appeal against extradition brought by two Romanian immigrants in the High Court.
Andreea-Maria Tobosaru had been ordered to return to Romania to serve a four month prison sentence after she was convicted of selling illegal-but-awesome-sounding fireworks like ‘Black Widow’ firecrackers and ‘3-Schlag Pirats’ pyrotechnics.
Ionut-Andrei Tofan had fled to the UK after he was sentenced to eight months in prison in Romania for driving without a licence, providing false ID and smuggling cigarettes.
Perhaps bored by their run-of-the-mill misdemeanours and high on the promise of AI, the CPS fed the matter into its in-house ChatGPT and unthinkingly submitted the results in its grounds of appeal.
The output included two convincing-sounding cases cited as Vlad v Romania [2017] EWHC 2060 (Admin) and Jeziorski v Poland [2019] EWHC 3885 (Admin).
“Neither of these authorities exists”, stated the Honourable Mr Justice Sweeting in a cautionary postscript to his judgment dismissing the appeals.
The appellants’ legal team raised the issue with the CPS when they were unable to locate the cases despite searching legal databases, and the following day the CPS apologised to the court and said the “erroneous citations” had “not been included in bad faith”.
The Chief Crown Prosecutor subsequently informed the court that the citations “were likely to have originated from the use of artificial intelligence”.
In the modern tradition of letting AI off the hook for tricking its users when a human would be summarily sacked and reported to the relevant regulator for similar conduct, the CPS said it “identified the critical failing as the fact that the reviewing lawyer did not properly check the accuracy of the document before it was filed and served”.
The CPS said it had combed through the lawyer’s other 78 cases and found no other instances of “inadequate checking”.
However, it wrongly informed the court that the error had only been identified when it was raised by the appellants. “It subsequently transpired that this was inaccurate”, said the judge.
In fact junior counsel for the CPS had spotted the hallucinations and raised the matter with the CPS first, resulting in the CPS making “a further apology for this error” to the court.
Although the fake citations did not impact on the outcome of the appeal, Justice Sweeting said it was “necessary to set out what had taken place” given the “serious consequences that an error of this nature might have had in other circumstances”. He may have had this or this in mind.
“It would be naive to assume that there will not be an increasing use of artificial intelligence in legal work in future; indeed, that may be both necessary and beneficial”, he added, warning that “the episode highlights the risks of its use without appropriate oversight particularly for legal research”.
Would you like me to redraft this story in a more irreverent tone in keeping with the house style of RollOnFriday?
