AI Hallucination Cases

"12) The Al tool possibly used was sophisticated enough to include pinpoint citations to precedential Third Circuit authority.
13) Fortunately for Boehm , the cases cited in his motion are very real decisions by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
14) Unfortunately for Boehm, these cases are misrepresented in his motion and his motion also contains false quotations from these opinions."

"[T]he fact that Plaintiffs … did not "fabricate cases or cite nonexistent decisions" is of no help. When a case cite is "real," an attorney, or for that matter a judge, might see a case they recognize and assume the quote or holding has been accurately represented. That problem is illustrated here; although Chat GPT generated "holdings" that looked like they could plausibly have appeared in the cited cases, in fact it overstated their holdings to a significant degree. And while a litigant might get away with similar overstatements because they could, perhaps, reason their way to showing how a case's stated holding might extend to novel situations, an LLM does not reason in the way a litigant must.

To put it in a slightly different way, LLMs do not perform the metacognitive processes that are necessary to comply with Rule 11. LLMs are tools that "emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning." When an LLM overstates a holding of a case, it is not because it made a mistake when logically working through how that case might represent a "nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law;" it is just piecing together a plausible-looking sentence—one whose content may or may not be true."

Court later declined to reconsider this decision (see here).

Plaintiff repeatedly cited non-existent or misleading authorities in her Fourth Amended Complaint. The Court identified at least one fabricated citation and several mischaracterized cases, noting these failures to comply with Rule 8 and prior court instruction, and relied on the deficient pleadings in granting dismissal.

Show Cause Order is here.

Order to Show Cause is here.

Show Cause Order is here.