Judge Reportedly Disqualifies Butler Snow Lawyers Following Purported Use of ChatGPT-Fabricated Citations in Alabama Prison Litigation

May 7, 2025

Judge Anna Manasco disqualified three attorneys from Butler Snow following the reported use of fabricated citations generated by ChatGPT in an Alabama prison litigation case. The lawyers were publicly reprimanded, referred to the Alabama State Bar, and ordered broad disclosure; sanctions against the firm were declined. An examination of 2,400 citations across 330 filings found no further errors.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 1.3 — similarity 0.625, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.622, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.612, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: butler-snow, matthew-b.-reeves, william-cranford, william-lunsford
Alleged developer: openai
Alleged harmed parties: frankie-johnson, alabama-department-of-corrections, state-of-alabama, butler-snow, matthew-b.-reeves, william-cranford, william-lunsford, judicial-integrity, epistemic-integrity, general-public-of-alabama

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1196

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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