South African Legal Team Reportedly Relied on Unverified ChatGPT Case Law in Johannesburg Body Corporate Defamation Matter
March 1, 2023
In a defamation case at the Johannesburg Regional Court, Rodrigues Blignaut Attorneys, representing plaintiff Michelle Parker, reportedly relied on purportedly non-existent legal judgments generated by ChatGPT to help argue their case. Magistrate Arvin Chaitram reportedly found the case names and citations were fictitious, causing a two-month delay. The court issued a punitive costs order and rebuked the plaintiff's legal team for uncritically accepting AI-generated research.
- Alleged deployer
- rodrigues-blignaut-attorneys, jurie-hayes, chantal-rodrigues
- Alleged developer
- openai
- Alleged harmed parties
- rodrigues-blignaut-attorneys, michelle-parker, legal-integrity, jurie-hayes, judicial-integrity, epistemic-integrity, chantal-rodrigues
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1138
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.
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