Phony ChatGPT Brief Leads to $5,000 Fine for NY Lawyers (1)

The lawyers behind a court brief filled with phony case citations dreamed up by ChatGPT were fined $5,000 after a federal judge found they’d acted in bad faith.

US District Judge P. Kevin Castel imposed the fine Thursday on the law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman P.C., finding that two of the firm’s lawyers had consciously avoided indications that the citations were fake and made “misleading statements to the court.”

The firm and the lawyers, Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca, “abandoned their responsibilities when they submitted non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ...