Technology
Jun. 25, 2025
Why ChatGPT writes fake court opinions
Artificial intelligence in law, especially large language models like ChatGPT, works by predicting the next word in a sequence using complex high-dimensional patterns -- making them powerful but prone to confidently generating plausible yet false information.
Clint Ehrlich
Partner
Trial Lawyers for Justice
Clint Ehrlich is a partner at Trial Lawyers for Justice and a computer scientist who served as a principal investigator for the National Science Foundation. He sits on the AI Committee of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the 9th Circuit.
The most consequential legal technology of the century goes by two letters: AI. But few lawyers understand what is actually going on behind the scenes when they submit a query to an artificial intelligence platform like ChatGPT. That is evinced by the recently-imposed sanction orders for the misuse of AI against even high-profile law firms.
As both a computer scientist and an appellate attorney, I se...
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