Reported False Legal Citations in South African Case Mavundla v. MEC Generated by Purported AI Tool
September 20, 2024
In Mavundla v. MEC: Department of Co-Operative Government and Traditional Affairs KwaZulu-Natal, the law firm Surendra Singh and Associates, representing South African politician Philani Godfrey Mavundla, reportedly submitted false legal citations, apparently generated by AI, in filings at the Pietermaritzburg High Court. The court reportedly found that many of the cited cases did not exist in any databases, and the firm's legal team and article clerk allegedly failed to verify the references.
- Alleged deployer
- surendra-singh-and-associates
- Alleged developer
- unnamed-large-language-model-developers, unnamed-generative-ai-companies
- Alleged harmed parties
- surendra-singh-and-associates, philani-godfrey-mavundla
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1137
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
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