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The lawyer was just trying to outsource his job of plausible bullshit generation. He would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for the fake cases.


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It's legit in his case, he's clearly doing such a bad job of it that nobody could mistake him for a real lawyer ;)

The lawyer didn't use ChatGPT to purposefully fabricate cases, he just relied on GPT and assumed it wasn't lying.

Sounds like the man's real case is against his lawyer.

It's also cleverly disguised PR for the attorney. Well played (so to speak).

It's already actual lawyers themselves trusting ChatGPT to generate paperwork:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/29/canada-lawyer-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/lawyers-have-rea...

Also Michael Cohen used ChatGPT, sent cases to his attorney and then realised they were nonsense:

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/30/1222273745/michael-cohen-ai-f...

I don't know how else to get this message across, but it does this all the time in all subjects.

It doesn't just occasionally hallucinate mistakes. The mechanism by which it makes non-mistakes is identical and it can't tell the difference.

There is no profession where you a) you shouldn't prefer an expert over ChatGPT and b) you won't find experts idiotically using ChatGPT to reduce their workloads.

This is why it's a grotesquely inappropriately positioned and marketed set of products.


This is the real bullshit.

Other people's lawyers are the worst.


I think the attorney might well have been trying to bluff the judge, too.

More than one. Here's two sources indicating at least four more lawyers out there using fake ChatGPT case citations.

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/05/27/a-partner-at-a-big-firm...

https://twitter.com/narrowlytaylord/status/16620971840770129...


That's the gist. This is the lawyer having (even more) fun with the lawsuit, because why the hell wouldn't you have fun in a job like this?

I'm pretty sure that he and the judge both know that Okrand's claim was a fiction/joke and that this isn't a serious legal notion to be ruled upon.


As they say, the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.

The DOJ lawyer was the worst part. Why was that clown even taking a such a strong side in a technical case like this?

> "Lawyer: ChatGPT said the cases were real"

A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.

This person claims to be a lawyer though...

That's just the lawyer being clever -- it's obvious that claims made in a fictional context don't have the kind of weight he's ascribing to them. It's funny, though.

How did these guys think they could keep the con running for so long? Being lawyers, you'd think they'd have some common sense.

"Real Lawyer"... technically true... But the lawyer doesn't appear to know much about the relevant law or technology.

He does have a pic of himself photoshopped into a courthouse. Weirdly floating at the bottom of this page: http://vandykelawfirm.com/index-2.html


Lawyers tend to love it when their opponents think they've found a cute legal hack.

He probably accepted their claims at face value and assumed they’d be somewhat based in truth, and their subsequent filing would have some reasonable logic that supported those claims.

Their new issue is that no judge will ever give them an ounce of leeway in the future.

I don’t know why a lawyer would trade their professional reputation in exchange for a lawsuit they know will lose, but good on thedacare for finding that idiot.

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