I went ahead and asked ChatGPT with the browsing plugin [1] because I was curious and it answered that it was a real case citing an article about the fake citations! After some prodding ("Are you sure?") it spat out something slightly saner citing this very article!

> The case "Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd., 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019)" was cited in court documents, but it appears that there might be some confusion or controversy surrounding this citation. It was mentioned in a list of cases for which a lawyer was ordered to provide copies, according to a court order on leagle.com [2] . However, a blog post on simonwillison.net suggests that the case might not be genuine and that it might have been generated by a language model such as ChatGPT. The post discusses a situation where a lawyer might have used generated case citations in court documents without fully understanding the tool they were using. The post also includes screenshots where the language model appears to confirm the existence of the case [3].

The output is hilariously bad and it's depressing a licensed attorney actually pulled this crap.

This is just more evidence that ChatGPT should not be used for anything serious without a trained human in the loop.

[1] https://chat.openai.com/share/a6e27cf2-b9a6-4740-be2e-fdddab...

[2] https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20230414825

[3] https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/27/lawyer-chatgpt/ (The TFA!)