A woman in California successfully used AI tools, including ChatGPT, to overturn her eviction notice and avoid tens of thousands of dollars in penalties over several months of litigation.
As NBC News reports, Lynn White was behind on rent and initially lost a jury trial after facing an eviction notice. Instead of continuing to work with a local tenant advocacy network, she consulted ChatGPT and the AI search platform Perplexity to represent herself in court.
That’s almost always a bad idea. But according to NBC, the chatbot identified potential errors in a judge’s procedural decisions for White, informed her what actions to take, and drafted responses to the court.
“I can’t overemphasize the usefulness of AI in my case,” she told the broadcaster. “I never, ever, ever, ever could have won this appeal without AI.”
White is one of several litigants NBC spoke to who represented themselves with the help of AI and came out on top. Another is Staci Dennett, a home fitness business owner in New Mexico, who used AI to successfully negotiate a settlement over unpaid debt.
“I would tell ChatGPT to pretend it was a Harvard Law professor and to rip my arguments apart,” she told NBC. “Rip it apart until I got an A-plus on the assignment.”
The output was eerily convincing.
“If the law is something you’re interested in as a profession, you could certainly do the job,” the opposing lawyers reportedly told her in an email.
However, the tools aren’t always successful in overturning decisions or winning legal cases. AI tools are known to spit out made-up and misleading information that could get a pro se litigant in trouble — like energy drink mogul Jack Owoc, who was sanctioned in August after filing a motion filled with hallucinated citations. Owoc was ordered to complete ten hours of community service, per NBC.
Perhaps more worryingly, even a growing number of professional lawyers have been caught red-handed submitting filings that include hallucinated court cases, resulting in penalties and embarrassment.
... continue reading