A prestigious Wall Street law firm has apologized to a federal judge for a filing that included erroneous content generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
Sullivan & Cromwell, the Manhattan-based white-shoe firm, sent a letter on April 18 to Chief Judge Martin Glenn of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, apologizing for submitting a motion that contained “inaccurate citations and other errors” caused in part by AI hallucinations, the phenomenon of AI chatbots generating plausible-sounding but false information.
“We deeply regret that this has occurred,” S&C partner Andrew Dieterich wrote in the letter.
Attached to the letter was a three-page list of roughly 40 corrections. The errors included incorrect citations, wrong volume numbers, and what appeared to be fabricated quotations attributed to real cases. Some of the mistakes, however, were clerical and not related to AI….