A lawyer used ChatGPT to prepare a court filing. It went horribly awry.

 A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT to prepare a court filing on behalf of a man suing an airline is now all too familiar with the artificial intelligence (AI) tool’s shortcomings — including its propensity to invent facts. 

  Roberto Mata sued Colombian airline Avianca last year, alleging that a metal food and beverage cart injured his knee on a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York. When Avianca asked a Manhattan judge to dismiss the lawsuit based on the statute of limitations, his lawyer submitted a brief based on research done by ChatGPT.

        While ChatGPT can be useful to professionals in numerous industries, including the legal profession, it has proved itself to be both limited and unreliable. In this case, the AI invented court cases that didn’t exist, and asserted that they were real. The fabrications were revealed when Avianca’s lawyers approached the case’s judge, saying they couldn’t locate the cases cited in Mata’s lawyers’ brief in legal databases.

        “It seemed clear when we didn’t recognize any of the cases in their opposition brief that something was amiss,” said the airline’s lawyer. And soon they figured it was some sort of chatbot of some kind. On the other hand, the passenger’s lawyer said that it was the first time he’d used ChatGPT for work and, therefore, he was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false. 

Internet: <www.cbsnews.com> (adapted).

        Businesses are starting to introduce new options for tipping at self-checkout machines, putting even more pressure on customers amid rising inflation costs. Despite having zero interaction with employees during transactions, self-checkout machines at places such as coffee shops, bakeries, airports, and sports stadiums are giving customers the option to leave the typical 20% tip, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

        Business owners believe that the prompt for a tip can boost staff pay and increase gratuities — but customers are questioning where and to whom the extra cash is going, considering self-checkout is done by the customers themselves. “They’re cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout. So what’s the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?” are some of the questions customers ask. But tipping researchers claim this is a way for companies to put the responsibility of paying employees on the customer rather than increasing employee salaries themselves. Self-tipping is viewed by many customers as a way to guilt-trip the person into tipping on something when they typically wouldn’t.

        Many companies told the Journal that these tipping prompts are optional, and the extra gratuity is split between all employees. However, experts say that tips at a self-checkout machine might never even get to an actual employee since protections for tipped workers in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act don’t extend to machines.

Internet: <https://nypost.com> (adapted).