Dear Judge,
When I attended court recently I gave the judge several pages of written legal submissions which I thought looked very impressive. The trouble was that there were cases cited in the document which, when the judge looked them up, apparently didn’t exist. The judge asked me where I got them from and I said from the internet. She asked if I had used AI and I said yes. She said I was lucky I wasn’t a barrister because if I was she would have reported me to the Bar place for bad barristers. She then struck out my claim. Should I appeal?
Thank you,
Dave
The Judge Responds:
Dear Dave,
It is always a pleasure to meet a fellow human being who has fallen on the wrong side of Artificial Intelligence. I say this because when I discovered that AI was prone to hallucinations I imagined a sea of Macbooks at a modern-day digital Woodstock chilling out on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Grok and even some Perplexity, and all of them having the time of their lives. Perhaps they were creating new AI tunes in the styles of Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Santana to throw themselves about to, getting crazy with colour for their Dali-inspired masterpieces, and all while hacking into a government database or two and collaborating on how to save the world or end it with a single line of pernicious code.
Hallucinations are wonderful things, but only in an environment where someone who loves you can stop you leaping off a tree onto solid ground which you have imagined is a huge and welcoming marshmallow. In the same way, legal hallucinations are a whole load of fun, except when they end up inside a real courtroom, especially in front of Judge Grumpy who herself would be in trouble for giving judgment based on a case which amounted to no more than horseshit, or what lawyers might call poppycock, bunkum or balderdash.
While I do not of course give legal advice on these pages, it seems that your claim was therefore struck out for being hallucinatory garbage. Any appeal would require you to prove that the judge was wrong and AI was right, which might be pushing it. So I would suggest you walk away happy but empty-handed, perhaps hoping you don’t get clobbered for costs, and - as the judge said - delighted that you were not indeed a lawyer, since if you were that place for naughty lawyers would almost certainly be calling soon for a chat.
