[tomek@vz]

An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month.

New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff's attorneys' request for sanctions that the defendant's counsel, Michael Fourte's law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff's motion for sanctions, but also included "multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations" in the process of opposing the motion.

"In other words," the judge wrote, "counsel relied upon unvetted AI -- in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues -- to defend his use of unvetted AI."

The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte's office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.

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Generative AI models trained on internet data lack exposure to vast domains of human knowledge that remain undigitized or underrepresented online. English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide. Approximately 97% of the world's languages are classified as "low-resource" in computing.

A 2020 study found 88% of languages face such severe neglect in AI technologies that bringing them up to speed would require herculean efforts. Research on medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia and New Guinea found more than 75% of 12,495 distinct uses of plant species were unique to just one local language. Large language models amplify dominant patterns through what researchers call "mode amplification." The phenomenon narrows the scope of accessible knowledge as AI-generated content increasingly fills the internet and becomes training data for subsequent models.