The high court of England and Wales says that lawyers need to take stronger measures to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence in their work.
In A sentence Linking two recent cases, Judge Victoria Sharp wrote that AI generative tools as Chatgpt “are unable to carry out reliable legal research.”
“These tools can cause seemingly coherent and plausible answers to the directions, but these coherent and plausible answers may be completely incorrect,” Judge Sharp wrote. “Answers can make statements simply false.”
This does not mean that lawyers cannot use the AI in their research, but said that they have a professional duty to “check the accuracy of these research by referring to authoritarian sources, before using it in the course of their professional work.”
Judge Sharp suggested that the growing number of cases in which lawyers (including, next to the United States, Lawyers representing the main AI platforms) They have quoted what seems to be falsehoods generated by Ai, suggesting that “it is necessary to do more to make sure that the orientation is followed and that the lawyers fulfill their duties before the court”, and said that their judgment will be sent to professional bodies, including the Law Council and the Law Society.
In one case, a lawyer representing a man looking for damage to two banks presented a presentation with 45 quotations: 18 of these cases did not exist, while many others “did not contain the quotations attributed to them, did not support the propositions for which they were cited and they had no relevance to the subject of the application,” said Judge Sharp.
On the other, a lawyer who represented a man who had been evicted from his London home wrote a court presentation that he quoted five cases that did not seem to exist. (The lawyer denied the use of the AI, although he said that quotations could have tried on summaries generated by AI that appeared in “Google or Safari”.) Judge Sharp said that, while the court decided not to start contempt, this is not “a precedent.”
“Lawyers who do not fulfill their professional obligations in this regard risk severe sanction,” he added.
The two lawyers were derived or referred to professional regulators. Judge Sharp said that when lawyers do not fulfill their duties before the court, the court’s powers range from “public warning” to the imposition of expenses, contempt procedures or even “police referrals”.
