HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Reported False Legal Citations in South African Case Mavundla v. MEC Generated by Purported AI Tool

September 20, 2024

In the case of Mavundla v. MEC: Department of Co-Operative Government and Traditional Affairs KwaZulu-Natal, reportedly false legal citations generated by an AI tool were submitted by the law firm Surendra Singh and Associates in filings at the Pietermaritzburg High Court. The court found that many of these cited cases did not exist in any databases, emphasizing the importance of trustworthy AI and proper verification practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

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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