AI-hallucinated cases end up in more court filings, and Butler Snow issues apology for 'inexcusable' lapse.

Butler Snow, one of the most celebrated law firms within the United States of America, recently came under the spotlight of the media due to the misuse of artificial intelligence by some team members. The firm's lawyers allegedly used ChatGPT to conduct searches regarding a case they were handling, obtaining chatbot-generated results.

It is not strange to learn of AI models suffering from “hallucinations,” providing false results, invented by the service so it can offer a result to the user. The error lies in the lack of fact-checking  what was obtained, as well as the decision to optimize time by entrusting the search to something as “unstable” as a chatbot.

Following the incident, Butler Snow's firm took care to provide a heartfelt apology for this serious mistake. However, the scourge of hallucinations seems to be just beginning, as several other companies are reporting problems of a similar nature.