test

You may have recently seen press reports about lawyers who filed and submitted papers to the federal district court for the Southern District of New York that included citations to cases and decisions that, as it turned out, were wholly made up; they did not exist.  The lawyers in that case used the generative artificial intelligence (AI) program ChatGPT to perform their legal research for the court submission, but did not realize that ChatGPT had fabricated the citations and decisions.  This case should serve as a cautionary tale for individuals seeking to use AI in connection with legal research, legal questions, or other legal issues, even outside of the litigation context.

In Mata v. Avianca, Inc.,[1] the plaintiff brought tort claims against an airline for injuries allegedly sustained when one of its employees hit him with a metal serving cart.  The airline filed a motion to dismiss the case. The plaintiff’s lawyer filed an opposition to that motion that included citations to several purported court decisions in its argument. On reply, the airline asserted that a number of the court decisions cited by the plaintiff’s attorney could not be found, and appeared not to exist, while two others were cited incorrectly and, more importantly, did not say what plaintiff’s counsel claimed. The Court directed plaintiff’s counsel to submit an affidavit attaching the problematic decisions identified by the airline.Continue Reading Use of ChatGPT in Federal Litigation Holds Lessons for Lawyers and Non-Lawyers Everywhere

Seyfarth Synopsis: Since ChatGPT became available to the public at large in November 2022, employers have been wondering, and asking their employment lawyers, “What kind of policies should we be putting in place around the use of ChatGPT in the workplace?”  Although at this stage it is difficult to imagine all of the different ways ChatGPT, and its subsequent iterations, could be used by employees in the workplace, it is important to consider some of the more obvious usage cases and how employers might choose to address them in workplace policies.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) — an AI language model that is trained to interact in a conversational way.  At its most basic level, AI is a computer system able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.  In order to achieve this, AI needs to be trained.  First, massive data sets are fed into a computer algorithm.  Then the trained model is evaluated in order to determine how well it performs in making predictions when confronted with previously unseen data.  For ChatGPT, it is predicting the next word in a given context to provide that conversational tone for which it has become known.  Lastly, the AI goes through a testing phase to find out if the model performs well on large amounts of new data it has not seen before.  This is the phase in which ChatGPT finds itself. Continue Reading ChatGPT – What Employers Should Be Worried About Now