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South African Legal Team Reportedly Relied on Unverified ChatGPT Case Law in Johannesburg Body Corporate Defamation Matter

March 1, 2023

In a recent defamation case at the Johannesburg Regional Court, Rodrigues Blignaut Attorneys reportedly relied on purportedly non-existent legal judgments generated by ChatGPT. Magistrate Arvin Chaitram found the case names and citations to be 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. This incident highlights the need for trustworthy AI governance and guardrails to prevent such harm.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

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.

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.