In what might be this year’s most cringeworthy legal filing, a New York federal judge threw a lifeline out the window and handed down default judgment after a defense lawyer kept submitting briefs sprinkled with fabricated AI citations and an oddball quote from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
The court flagged the filings as “noteworthy” not for brilliance but for hallucinations that read like half-baked prose from a badly tuned language model. Among the suspect material: invented case cites, references to ancient libraries with zero bearing on the issues, and florid literary detours that left the judge rubbing their temples.
One would hope for a teachable moment. Instead the result was a sanction storm, with the judge concluding that the repeated bogus submissions—AI-flavored or otherwise—undermined the very notion of reliable advocacy. This is more than a footnote in AI ethics but rather a cautionary tale for firms flirti ng with generative tools without even asking if they’re on solid legal ground.
