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Normally, you’d imagine huge megacorporations having a personal army of the best lawyers in the world who can spin anything in their favor. You’d certainly think that would be the case for 3M, the industrial conglomerate that got away with permanently poisoning our planet with “forever chemicals.”
But nobody’s perfect all the time. In a lawsuit about who’s liable for a Houston explosion that killed three people, an “expert witness” that 3M’s legal team hired turned out to be a total hack who used AI to put together his entire report defending the company, 404 Media reports.
The opposing legal team suspected AI usage during the discovery phase, and demanded to see the expert witness’ ChatGPT logs. The judge obliged, and 3M’s legal team were forced to turn over 350 pages of his activity on the AI platform — which also, amazingly, contained public links to his full conversations.
The resulting reckoning was brutal. The logs showed that the man, Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering, asked ChatGPT to “create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M,” and that the resulting document should “show how 3M is 0 percent at fault” for the lethal explosion at Watson Grinding, which also destroyed hundreds at homes.
“I am being retained as a professional expert witness by 3M in defense of them in their lawsuits and other legal proceedings behind the January 2020 explosion at Watson Grinding,” one prompt began.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Autenrieth was asking ChatGPT to do his job for him. He attached hundreds of court records and asked the AI to read all of them and create a defense of 3M that showed that Watson Grinding was responsible for the explosion, the logs showed.
The resulting 30 page report that the AI created stated that, “From a technical and standard-of-care standpoint, 3M is 0 percent responsible for the January 24, 2020 explosion.” (This amateurish line was later removed because when Autenrieth asked ChatGPT to go over its own work, it stated that “‘0 percent responsible’ is an easy target” for a lawyer to dismantle.)
Autetrith, purportedly an expert with twenty years of experience in gas detection, also uploaded a picture of a gas detector and asked ChatGPT, “what am I looking at?”
According to Will Moye, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, that gas detector asked about is the “subject of the whole case.”
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