Prosecutor Used Flawed A.I. to Keep a Man in Jail, His Lawyers Say; The New York Times, November 25, 2025

 Shaila Dewan, The New York Times ; Prosecutor Used Flawed A.I. to Keep a Man in Jail, His Lawyers Say

"On Friday, the lawyers were joined by a group of 22 legal and technology scholars who warned that the unchecked use of A.I. could lead to wrongful convictions. The group, which filed its own brief with the state Supreme Court, included Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has helped to exonerate more than 250 people; Chesa Boudin, a former district attorney of San Francisco; and Katherine Judson, executive director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, a nonprofit that seeks to improve the reliability of criminal prosecutions.

The problem of A.I.-generated errors in legal papers has burgeoned along with the popular use of tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, which can perform a wide range of tasks, including writing emails, term papers and legal briefs. Lawyers and even judges have been caught filing court papers that were rife with fake legal references and faulty arguments, leading to embarrassment and sometimes hefty fines.

The Kjoller case, though, is one of the first in which prosecutors, whose words carry great sway with judges and juries, have been accused of using A.I. without proper safeguards...

Lawyers are not prohibited from using A.I., but they are required to ensure that their briefs, however they are written, are accurate and faithful to the law. Today’s artificial intelligence tools are known to sometimes “hallucinate,” or make things up, especially when asked complex legal questions...

Westlaw executives said that their A.I. tool does not write legal briefs, because they believe A.I. is not yet capable of the complex reasoning needed to do so...

Damien Charlotin, a senior researcher at HEC Paris, maintains a database that includes more than 590 cases from around the world in which courts and tribunals have detected hallucinated content. More than half involved people who represented themselves in court. Two-thirds of the cases were in United States courts. Only one, an Israeli case, involved A.I. use by a prosecutor."

Vigilante Lawyers Expose the Rising Tide of A.I. Slop in Court Filings; The New York Times, November 7, 2025

Evan Gorelick , The New York Times; Vigilante Lawyers Expose the Rising Tide of A.I. Slop in Court Filings

"Mr. Freund is part of a growing network of lawyers who track down A.I. abuses committed by their peers, collecting the most egregious examples and posting them online. The group hopes that by tracking down the A.I. slop, it can help draw attention to the problem and put an end to it.

While judges and bar associations generally agree that it’s fine for lawyers to use chatbots for research, they must still ensure their filings are accurate.

But as the technology has taken off, so has misuse. Chatbots frequently make things up, and judges are finding more and more fake case law citations, which are then rounded up by the legal vigilantes.

“These cases are damaging the reputation of the bar,” said Stephen Gillers, an ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Lawyers everywhere should be ashamed of what members of their profession are doing.”...

The problem, though, keeps getting worse.

That’s why Damien Charlotin, a lawyer and researcher in France, started an online database in April to track it.

Initially he found three or four examples a month. Now he often receives that many in a day.

Many lawyers, including Mr. Freund and Mr. Schaefer, have helped him document 509 cases so far. They use legal tools like LexisNexis for notifications on keywords like “artificial intelligence,” “fabricated cases” and “nonexistent cases.”

Some of the filings include fake quotes from real cases, or cite real cases that are irrelevant to their arguments. The legal vigilantes uncover them by finding judges’ opinions scolding lawyers."