UK Court Warns Lawyers Can Be Prosecuted Over A.I. Tools That ‘Hallucinate’ Fake Material

Friday, the High Court of England and Wales warned the lawyers that they could face criminal proceedings for having presented false documents generated by artificial intelligence, after a series of cases mentioned in quotes and invented decisions that did not exist.

In a rare intervention, one of the older judges in the country said that the councils existing to lawyers had proven to be “insufficient to approach the abusive use of artificial intelligence” and that other stages were urgently necessary.

Victoria Sharp’s decisionPresident of the Division of the Bench of the High Court King, and a second judge, Jeremy Johnson, detailed two recent cases in which false documents were used in written legal arguments presented to the court.

In one case, an applicant and his lawyer admitted that IA tools had generated “inaccurate and fictitious” equipment in a trial against two banks rejected last month. In the other case, which ended in April, a lawyer of a man pursuing his local council said that she could not explain where a series of non -existent cases came from in the arguments.

Judge Sharp gathered the two examples using rarely exercised powers that have been designed to allow the “court to regulate their own procedures and enforce the duties that lawyers owe”.

“There are serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the judicial system if artificial intelligence is poorly used,” she wrote, warning that lawyers may be found guilty of a criminal offense or forbidden to practice to use false materials generated by AI.