What was hallucinated

Misrepresented: Legal Norm | Chat GPT produced advice asserting various employment and statutory obligations were contravened and recommended commencing a s.365 application; the Commission found 'no basis for this advice' and that reliance on it led to an unmeritorious claim. || Misrepresented: Legal Norm | ChatGPT stated that various employment and statutory obligations had been contravened by the employer; the Commission said it could see no basis for this advice. || Misrepresented: Legal Norm | ChatGPT advised commencing legal actions including a s.365 application despite a 919-day delay; the Commission noted the 21-day limit and refused to extend time, finding no basis for the advice.

Sanction teardown · Fair Work Commission, Australia · 2025-08-08

Deysel v Electra Lift Co.

What happened

In Fair Work Commission, Australia, a filing relied on ChatGPT to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Misrepresented (Legal Norm)

Chat GPT produced advice asserting various employment and statutory obligations were contravened and recommended commencing a s.365 application; the Commission found 'no basis for this advice' and that reliance on it led to an unmeritorious claim.
Misrepresented (Legal Norm)

ChatGPT stated that various employment and statutory obligations had been contravened by the employer; the Commission said it could see no basis for this advice.
Misrepresented (Legal Norm)

ChatGPT advised commencing legal actions including a s.365 application despite a 919-day delay; the Commission noted the 21-day limit and refused to extend time, finding no basis for the advice.

Which AI tool

ChatGPT. Note: Charlotin's public database records tool attribution only where a court order, brief, or reporting on the matter states it explicitly; "unidentified" or "implied" means the record indicates AI use but does not name a specific product — we do not guess.

Outcome

Application dismissed

How Citation Safe would have caught this

Citation Safe runs three deterministic layers before a brief is filed: (1) does the citation exist against CourtListener's database of published opinions, (2) if quoted, does that exact language appear in the source, (3) does the cited case actually support the proposition it is cited for. Fabricated case citations fail Layer 1. Fabricated or misattributed quotations fail Layer 2 even when the underlying case is real. Misrepresented holdings — a real case cited for a proposition it does not support — are the target of Layer 3. None of these checks involve asking another language model whether the citation looks right; they are lookups and text-matches against the actual source, which is why a hallucinated citation has to survive a direct lookup against the authoritative source — not another model's opinion — to earn a VERIFIED stamp; our measured false-verify rate is published live at /quality.

Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/709/Mr_Branden_Deysel_v_Electra_Lift_Co..pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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