Fraudulent appeal to non-existent AI generated case law.
Judges are identifying suspected AI hallucinations in Pa. court cases — including one at the highest levels by Sarah Boden for Spotlight PA | Jan. 7, 2026 “Who wrote it? And does it contain AI, artificial intelligence hallucinations?” Wolf asked King. The attorney seemed rattled and apologized to the justice. The issues Wolf noted include misquotes, attribution errors, and quotes that don’t exist. One quote in the brief was attributed to Bayada Nurses, Inc. v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Labor and Industry, a 2010 ruling from the state Supreme Court. The brief reads, “agencies ‘may not, under the guise of interpretation, enlarge a statute or engraft additional substantive requirements not included by the General Assembly.’” This quote appears nowhere in the Supreme Court’s opinion.
Including citations of non-existent court decisions is variation on fraudulent appeal to authority: the tactic of citing sources that don't actually back up a claim. In this case, they're citing sources that don't exist. The scary part about this is that the report is about the ones that were caught. How many instances have there possibly been of cases decided upon using AI errors, basing rulings on fake arguments and fraudulent citation of case laws and legal codes? One would think that lawyers of all people should understand that using error and false info prone AI chatbot generated text in their work is completely inappropriate, but it seems like it is a widespread practice.
My letter to reps:
How do we know that court cases being decided now aren't polluted with fraudulent appeal to authority where lawyers cite case law from the past that don't back up their claims because they don't even exist, they're AI generated? There should be a law that practicing law cannot include using AI chatbots or LLM text generators at all, because they are error prone and have a tendency to produce made up stuff. The recent case reported on that cited non-existent text attributed to Bayada Nurses, Inc. v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Labor and Industry highlights this. That instances was found, but how many cases are being decided on with case law or legal code that doesn't even exist, but was just made up by chatbot and used because the lawyer liked that it backed up their claim? Is anything in the judicial system to be trusted anymore as real?
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Fraudulent Appeal to Authority. The tactic of citing sources that don’t actually back up a claim. This ploy utilizes the halo effect, anchoring bias, the mere exposure effect, autopilot thinking, and informational learned helplessness. And it’s fraud. Chloe Humbert Feb 09, 2024
