Katrina Martinez, Head of Finance at Hybrid Work Solutions & Peripherals at HP, gave this presentation at the FP&A Summit in June 2023.

Every single day, I see news headlines related to AI. Every single day, all over my LinkedIn feed and my Apple News feed. 

But there's one particular story that really caught my attention last week. It was about this lawyer In New York. It was a federal case, where a plaintiff's lawyer was suing an airline for for damages. The plaintiff's attorney sent a brief to the court which the defense reviewed. This brief referenced multiple cases, building their case and justifying the lawsuit against the airline. 

What was interesting was that the defense came back and said, “Hey, we can't find these cases in any of the legal literature. Where are these cases?” 

It made its way to the judge, and the judge was very mad. He demanded that the lawyer come forward with what happened with these fake cases. It turned out that they’d submitted six fake cases in the briefing, and the lawyer had to admit that he'd used ChatGPT to make up the cases. 

The lawyer feels terrible, the judge is mad. He's considering sanctions, which can be a fine or even jail time. This is a very serious thing. 

I'll defend the guy a bit because if you think about all the headlines about AI that come all the time and you go into ChatGPT, under the chat box in very small print, it says that this product could actually just make up stuff about people, places, and facts.