HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Colorado Lawyer Filed a Motion Citing Hallucinated ChatGPT Cases

June 13, 2023

A Colorado Springs attorney, Zachariah Crabill, mistakenly used hallucinated ChatGPT-generated legal cases in court documents. The AI software provided false case citations, leading to the denial of a motion and legal repercussions for Crabill, highlighting risks in using AI for legal research.
Alleged deployer
zachariah-crabill
Alleged developer
openai, chatgpt
Alleged harmed parties
zachariah-crabill's-client, zachariah-crabill, legal-system

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/615

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

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.