People need to be held in contempt if there's any AI hallucinations in their filings.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Many freaked out when Antropic reported they were going to watermark AI generated text because they'll be caught quickly.
People in software development who use AI to code don't realize how many white collar mid level admin people have started totally phoning it in using LLMs. I'm mildly curious to see how long they can ride this out.
Before the pandemic, two of my coworkers were first year law students together at the local university. The teachers discovered a cheating ring of 170+ students in their class of something like 200 students.
They just made them take a new version of the most recent exam and there was no other punishment, because it was too devastatingly large a portion of their students to expel them all, even though that was their stated policy.
I suspect something similar will happen with AI, and it will be just as disappointing.
85% of law students have poor ethics. Yeah, that sounds about right
because it was too devastatingly large a portion of their students to expel them all, even though that was their stated policy
And here we can observe the mechanism behind collective action: Whether what you're doing is legal is becomes less important if there are enough of you to make punishing them all infeasible.
Of course, reality is more complex and less homogeneous than a class of aspiring lawyers, so assembling a sufficiently large and disciplined group is more difficult.
Too big to care
yea it would likely draw in investigation from otuside sources, too much negative publicity would hurt the law school, less people applying to a less than legitimate school. could be de-accreditation worthy too.
Confirmed. I use AI at my white collar work . After years of experience I can do my job in my sleep so I dont see an issue with getting AI to do the heavy lifting. I just check to make sure the output isn't wrong or un-commercial and edit it to make it sound more natural. This can sometimes take a lot more time than just doing it myself tbf.
Maybe this is the end of the World and I'll end up brain dead and/or unemployed but for now at least it makes my work day more bearable.
Also a white collar guy in a professional industry. I write lots of letters, memos, and other "word spreadsheets" as I call them.
I am well versed enough with Ai that I know I could have it help me do my job; however, I find I would spend as much or more time reviewing it and rewriting it that I have chosen not to use it almost at all.
I've used it for some simple review or research but again it is limited and have provided incorrect information often so I typically avoid it and rely on human ingenuity.
My work day is bearable because I take time through my day to unplug, walk outside and talk to other humans and for that I am aware I'm privileged in that regard.
I agree. If you use a gun to kill someone, then you are the killer, not the gun. If you use an AI to lie in court, then you are the liar, not the AI, and you should be charged accordingly. The AI, like the gun, is just the tool used by a person to commit the crime.
if there is any indication of ai usage in their filings*
that shit has no place in anything that matters
I agree with you, AI should not be used in legal cases, but good luck with that.
The immediate problem with legal system is not even persuation, it's the burden of untangling the facts.
Experts who should be using their knowledge are tempted to use AI to make their arguments to save time and effort. AI will happily comply even if it has to make up laws and precedents, and most individuals and small businesses would not have the savvy and resources to figure it out. Even if they do, it ends up as a challenge in court, which acts a straightforward amplification attack against an already overburdened legal system.
I'm seeing academic venues threatened to ban people if they implications are egregious enough.
There's no reason why law shouldn't work the same way.
Yeah.
It’s crazy to think they wouldn’t, like with any other form of plagiarism or fraud. AI isn’t some special case that somehow gets people out of responsibility.
Someone sends me anything with a reference that doesn't exist they can get fucked. Student, colleague... doesn't matter.
LLMs (especially Gemini) have a tendency to hallucinate things from extant references, especially with a huge blob of spammy search results in context.
Even with a real reference, you have to be careful.
…TBH, I’ve been fighting fire with fire. Sometimes I get local Qwen 27B to point to the relevant bit in a reference. If there is one.
That's sort of what I meant. It's not just the existence of the reference. It's the fraudulent nature of it.
gemini mostly gets thier data from reddit anyways, hence the recent aggressiveness in reddit forcing logins, they likely mined all the data they could from genuine users, and need more new content.
apparently cheating isnt one of them. but protesting against zionism is one of them, that dont get reported in the news anymore.
475$ an hour? Fucking hell, for that money I'll write any report to whitewash you and I won't make it apparent that I'm using AI to talk about shit I have no idea about, AND I'll make sure that if I do use AI to write the whole thing then it won't be traced back to me by my ChatGPT history lmao
What a shitty asshole. I'd ve the better shitty asshole
You can still wipe, they’re not paying you for all that. Geez man.
So you're saying you're bribable?
For 475$ an hour? Absolutely. I'd be getting paid near 5 grand a day for working 3 hours a day.
I hope you're not an expect witness in maths.
I'm having a stroke even trying to understand the 'math' there. It'd take a 10 hour workday to be "near" 5 grand a day.
You just gotta do at least three hours per hour, and it's easy!
Fuck, why didn't I think of that? I could triple my current take home pay with this one simple trick.
Per week maybe? Like after taxes and such
Probably billable rate, so ~$150/hr earned, or ~$300k a year... Yeah I'll take that deal
“Show me how the conclusion I’m starting with is correct.”
(Semi) covert was of using AI, especially like this, should be regarded as a criminal offense ending in jail time
This really should be considered contempt of court.
Expert witnesses seem to be fake more often than not.
I imagine being an expert witness is pretty lucrative in the right industry. You wouldn't need to do anything else, once you had your bona fides and a few connections to start. It can be done by video, you could do it from anywhere in the world. Say, your five-star hotel room in France.
i suspect, shit like this is going to prompt some idiotic supreme court verdict is going to be set in stone for the next 10 years.
example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Grants_Pass_v._Johnson
if its not a guarenteed win, then dont push it to supreme court level. the consequences are severe for everyone.
Curiously SCOTUS isn't even trying. I expect them to be Cardinal fucking Richelieu in their arguments, capable of explaining logically how they reached their findings so that any reasonable person (e.g. me) would be able to understand their conclusion.
But no. Dobbs, for instance, is word salad, and there are numerous legal scholars who have dissected Alito's opinion, and concluded not only that it doesn't make sense but reached consensus as to how. When you're the captured US Supreme Court and beholden to absolutely no ethical or professional obligations, you can opine obvious bullshit, and that counts.
Maybe, once we can get AI to stop from hallucinating, we can get it to overhaul court opinions from appeals courts up, and highlight which ones are sound and which are folly. But for now, everyone knows SCOTUS is captured and beholden to a specific agenda and ideology in defiance of logic or the good of the public. And there's nothing (legal) that we can do about it.
Maybe a plumber's brother might help, but that's a different topic.
