Wait, this is handled as "ChatGPT made up these cases" and not as "Layers deliberately used ChatGPT to fabricate stuff"? Is anyone really believing a lawyer is that stupid? I know, adssume good intentions and all, but in this case, really?
I also believe lawyers who are stupid enough not to verify ChatGPT's responses should be treated as if they willfully lied to the court. "Oops, I didn't know" is a good defence when you're caught accidentally walking on the grass, not when you're in court.
There's over a million lawyers in the United States.
You'd expect at least one of them to be a 1-in-a-million level of bad, or 4.7 standard deviations below the mean assuming a Gaussian distribution of competency.
An average person would normally never come across that lawyer in their lifetime, but media will find that lawyer and amplify their mistakes to everyone in the population.
Occam's Razor here is that this person was lazy, ignorant, careless, stupid, or any combination of those. To be intentionally fraudulent in this circumstance is the equivalent of trying to steal a gun from a cop. You're fucking with the one person in society who definitely has the training, motivation, and willingness to stop you.
What gets me is that they doubled down when asked to provide copies. Seriously, when that happens, you don't ask ChatGPT if the cases are real, you do your own damn search, and apologize profusely for your mistake. That really makes me question whether they were trying to pull a fast one, and then play dumb when caught, or if they really are that stupid.
If he thinks it is like querying a database and had never heard of hallucinations then this could just be an honest mistake. Especially if he thinks AI would be smarter than a database.
My first thought that he was a mess in general but we really don't have enough information. Like the other guy saying he cheated in life, it is pretty absurd to infer that.
I think non-technical people, lawyers included, are being duped into thinking the true singularity-level AI revolution just happened.
Plenty of smart people don’t understand how ChatGPT works or what it’s limitations are. A bunch of nerds built the best BS generator in history and marketed it as a super intelligent computer. If you ask it for relevant cases and it spits out a bunch of plausible information, is it really on them to know the tool is just really good at making things up?