Two New York lawyers have been fined $5,000 in a legal first after they relied on fake research created by ChatGPT for a submission in an injury claim against Avianca airline.
Judge Kevin Castel said attorneys Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca acted in bad faith by using the AI bot’s submissions – some of which contained ‘gibberish’ – even after judicial orders questioned their authenticity.
Schwartz and LoDuca had been representing Roberto Mata, who claimed his knee was injured when he was struck by a metal serving cart on an Avianca flight from El Salvador to Kennedy International Airport in New York in 2019.
When the Colombian airline asked a Manhattan judge to throw out the case because the statute of limitations had expired, Schwartz submitted a 10-page legal brief featuring half a dozen relevant court decisions.
But six cases cited in the filing – including Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines – did not exist.