A search with ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, was intended to facilitate the work of a team of lawyers and find supplementary case examples for their arguments in a dispute before the High Court in Pietermaritzburg, in the coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal.
The AI tool did just that, and the legal representatives submitted a notice of appeal in which they cited several authorities and case studies highlighted by the tool.
But when the judge conducted an independent search using ChatGPT to verify one of the citations, he found to his utter amazement that many of the cited cases were not included in any recognized legal database.
The court ultimately ruled against the plaintiff, stating in the written judgment: “The court has gained the impression that the lawyers placed false trust in the veracity of AI-generated legal research and, out of laziness, failed to check this research.”
