{"id":413652,"date":"2026-04-23T15:29:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T15:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/413652\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T15:29:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T15:29:20","slug":"another-hallucinated-court-filing-highlights-the-difference-between-silicon-valley-and-the-rest-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/413652\/","title":{"rendered":"Another \u2018hallucinated\u2019 court filing highlights the difference between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n A version of this story appeared in CNN Business\u2019 Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

New York\u00a0\u2014\u00a0\n <\/p>\n

\n We may have just witnessed the most egregious instance of workslop<\/a> to date, and it\u2019s one that matters \u2014 not only because it\u2019s objectively funny, but also because it captures an under-discussed nuance in the way generative AI functions (or malfunctions) for different industries.\n <\/p>\n

\n Bear with me.\n <\/p>\n

\n On Saturday, a top-ranked lawyer at one of the most prestigious law firms on the planet apologized profusely in a letter to a judge after submitting a court filing peppered with errors, including fabricated citations, generated by AI.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe deeply regret that this has occurred,\u201d Andrew Dietderich, co-head of Sullivan & Cromwell\u2019s restructuring division, wrote in the letter, which included a three-page list identifying and correcting each of the more than 40 errors. (A little salt in the wound: Dietderich said he learned of the problems only after they were caught by opposing counsel from Boies Schiller Flexner.)\n <\/p>\n

\n In the letter, Dietderich chalked the errors up to \u201challucinations\u201d in which AI tools \u201cfabricate case citations, misquote authorities, or generate non-existent legal sources.\u201d He also said that while the firm has safeguards around AI to prevent \u201cexactly this situation,\u201d those policies were not followed in the preparation of that particular document.\n <\/p>\n

\n Now, this was hardly the first (nor, likely, will it be the last) instance of fancy-pants lawyers running into an AI buzzsaw. This kind of thing happens with surprising frequency<\/a>, though rarely do we see it from the likes of Sullivan & Cromwell, an elite Wall Street firm whose partners reportedly<\/a> charge around $2,000 an hour for bankruptcy cases. (The firm didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.)\n <\/p>\n

\n But one of the more striking things about this episode this how it highlights AI\u2019s utility gap. More than three years into the breathless hype cycle kicked off by the launch of ChatGPT, it\u2019s clear that generative AI can do a lot for a very specific kind of worker \u2014 namely, those who code<\/a> \u2014 and it can lead to an embarrassing boondoggle<\/a> for others.\n <\/p>\n

\n That\u2019s because coding is fundamentally deterministic, meaning there are yes\/no, right\/wrong outcomes. In coding jobs, the software you\u2019re building either works or it doesn\u2019t.\n <\/p>\n

\n Other modes of office work tend happen in gray areas: How do we craft a slogan that reflects our values? Will my boss prefer serif or sans serif headings in this pitch deck? Which bit of case law should I cite to best support my client\u2019s case?\n <\/p>\n

\n In non-coding jobs, there are degrees of functionality informed by value judgments. (This newsletter, for example, still goes out even with typos, as my regular readers are keen to note.) Of course, you can ask a chatbot to weigh in, or use it as a sounding board, but there is no single, irrefutable answer to those kinds of questions.\n <\/p>\n

\n This distinction of science versus art matters, because right now, tech companies and investors on Wall Street are making huge bets<\/a> on AI. But, as investor Paul Kedrosky told \u201cPlain English\u201d podcast host Derek Thompson<\/a> last month , those investors are often basing their demand estimates on the experience of early adopters in tech who are \u201cprofoundly unrepresentative of the rest of the real world of work.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Coders\u2019 work is also uniquely expansive, Kedrosky argued. In other words, the more code you write, the more power it requires. Most other white-collar applications for AI \u201ctend to be compressive \u2014 \u2018I\u2019ve got a giant report, I don\u2019t want to read it, tell me the bullets.\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n None of this is to say AI isn\u2019t (or won\u2019t one day be) helpful for lawyers, researchers, journalists, marketers and the like. It\u2019s just that the promise of an AI revolution originated with people like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Mark Zuckerberg \u2014 folks who not only stand to get much richer if we all start using AI, but also who are most familiar with the world of tech.\n <\/p>\n

\n And that matters when it comes to proving what\u2019s hype and what\u2019s real promise. It\u2019s arguable that three-ish years isn\u2019t enough time for large language models to prove themselves as the world-destroyers<\/a> they are promised to be.\n <\/p>\n

\n But it\u2019s not like LLMs are the only AI application the world has seen. Tesla\u2019s \u201cFull Self Driving,\u201d for instance, still isn\u2019t quite doing what customers were promised, even a decade after CEO Elon Musk predicted it would drive fully autonomously, coast-to-coast, within two years.\n <\/p>\n

\n That hasn\u2019t stopped Tesla from selling the system based on the idea that it sort of works, sometimes or often, depending on conditions, with a human to assist it. It\u2019s better than it was, but it\u2019s not good enough to replace every taxi driver just yet.\n <\/p>\n

\n And maybe that\u2019s where AI in general is really headed. Could it be an imminent world destroyer<\/a>? Maybe. Could it also just be something that helps out, but still needs a human to assist it to avoid disaster, for the foreseeable future?\n <\/p>\n

\n Or how about this one, more specifically: Could AI models digest all the legal texts ever written, proving we won\u2019t need as many human lawyers<\/a> or paralegals?\n <\/p>\n

\n The answer, like so many answers in white-collar work: Maybe! In light of Sullivan & Cromwell\u2019s gaffe, it\u2019s fair to say LLMs aren\u2019t quite ready to represent humans in court.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A version of this story appeared in CNN Business\u2019 Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-413652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}