I dont understand how a lawyer can use AI like this and not just spend the little time required to check that the citations actually exist.
Way too many people think that LLMs understand the content in their dataset.
What annoys me more about this type of response is that I feel there's a less rude way to express the same.
_Everything_ that the magic robot spits out needs to be fact checked. At which point, well, really, why bother? Most people who depend upon the magic robot are, of course, not fact checking, because that would usually be slower than just doing the job properly from the start.
You also see people using magic robot output for things that you _couldn't_ Google for. I recently saw, on a financial forum, someone asking about ETFs vs investment trusts vs individual stocks with a specific example of how much they wanted to invest (the context is that ETFs are taxed weirdly in Ireland; they're allowed accumulate dividends without taxation, but as compensation they're subject to a special gains tax which is higher than normal CGT, and that tax is assessed as if you had sold and re-bought every eight years, even if you haven't). Someone posted a ChatGPT case study of their example (without disclosing, tsk; they owned up to it when people pointed out that it was totally wrong).
ChatGPT, in its infinite wisdom, provided what looked like a detailed comparison with worked examples... only the timescale for the individual stocks was 20 years, the ETFs 8 years (also it screwed up some of the calculations and got the marginal income tax rate a few points wrong). It _looked_ like something that someone had put some work into, if you weren't attuned to that characteristic awful LLM writing style, but it made a mistake that it's hard to imagine a human ever making. Unless you worked through it yourself, you'd come out of it thinking that individual stocks were clearly a _way_ better option; the truth is considerably less clear.
The ChatGPT responses seem to generally be in the tone of someone who has a harder question that requires a human (not googleable), and the laziness is the answer, not the question.
In my view the role of who is wasting others time with laziness is reversed.
Ah, we didn't knew just how good we had it...
(At least it is (was ?) real humans doing the writing, you can look at modification history, well made articles have sources, and you can debate issues with the article in the Talk page and even maybe contribute directly to it...)
Second, the mistakes weren't just incorrect citations any paralegal could check
... Some of the 'mistakes' (strictly speaking they are not mistakes, of course) are _citations of cases which do not exist_.
Outside of the literal dollar cost, the opportunity cost here is further delays on the docket because the clerk was unable to do something else, and the court time that must now be spent dealing with the issue.