<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/31/judge-pulls-opinion-full-of-ai-style-hallucinations-but-no-one-is-willing-to-say-it-was-written-by-ai/>
"Let’s say you’re a federal judge, and you need to write an opinion about a
securities case. You could do it the time-tested old-fashioned way: read the
briefings, read the relevant caselaw, check your quotes, make sure you’ve got
the holdings right. Or you could try one of these new AI tools that everyone’s
talking about. Just feed it a prompt like “write me a securities opinion with
lots of citations about scienter” and see what happens.
What could go wrong?
Well, you might end up like Judge Julien Xavier Neals of the District of New
Jersey, who just had to withdraw his entire opinion after a lawyer politely
pointed out that it was riddled with fabricated quotes, nonexistent case
citations, and completely backwards case outcomes. The kind of errors that have
a very specific signature—the same signature that’s gotten lawyers sanctioned
for over a year now.
Now, there are a few possible explanations here. Maybe Judge Neals was having
the worst research day in judicial history and just happened to make multiple
errors that perfectly mimic AI hallucinations through pure coincidence. Maybe
there’s some other explanation for why a federal judge would confidently cite
cases for propositions they directly contradict.
Or maybe—and this is just a thought—Judge Neals used the same AI tools that
have been getting lawyers in trouble for over a year, and somehow expected a
different result.
The particularly puzzling part is that courts have been sanctioning lawyers for
exactly these AI hallucination mistakes since 2023. If you’re a federal judge,
you’ve probably seen some of these cases come across your desk. You know what
AI hallucinations look like. You know they’re a problem. So what’s the excuse
here?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
