Sanction teardown · Queensland, Australia · 2025-03-26

LYJ v. Occupational Therapy Board of Australia

What happened

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

• Issue
  Fabricated: Case Law

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

No sanction; Fabrication noted; Warning issued regarding AI use

Additional detail

AI UseThe applicant cited Crime and Misconduct Commission v Chapman [2007] QCA 283 in support of a key submission. The Tribunal was unable to locate such a case. It queried ChatGPT, which returned a detailed but entirely fictitious account of a case that does not exist. The Tribunal attached Queensland’s AI usage guidelines to its reasons and emphasized that the responsibility for accuracy lies with the party submitting the material.Ruling/SanctionThe fabricated case was disregarded. The Tribunal granted a stay but issued a strong warning: litigants are responsible for understanding the limitations of AI tools and must verify all submitted material. The inclusion of fictitious material wastes time, diminishes credibility, and undermines the process.Key Judicial ReasoningCiting non-existent authorities "weakens their arguments. It raises issues about whether their submission can be considered as accurate and reliable. It may cause the Tribunal to be less trusting of other submissions which they make. It wastes the time for Tribunal members in checking and addressing these hallucinations. It causes a significant waste of public resources."

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.

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Source: https://naturalandartificiallaw.com/ai-hallucinations-by-chatgpt/, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).