LLMMedium
Unrepresented Litigant Misled by ChatGPT-Generated False Legal Citations in Manchester Court
- Occurred
- May 28, 2023
- Published
- May 28, 2023
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
A litigant in person (LiP) in a Manchester civil case presented false legal citations generated by ChatGPT. It fabricated one case name and provided fictitious excerpts for three real cases, misleadingly supporting the LiP's argument. The judge, upon investigation, found the submissions to be inadvertent and did not penalize the LiP.
Developers
- OpenAI
Deployers
- Unnamed Manchester litigant
Harmed parties
- Unnamed Manchester litigant
- Manchester court system
- General public
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: ChatGPT hallucinated legal citations causing court confusion, but no penalties were imposed.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8