Rather than courts punishing pro se litigants for false citations from hallucinations when they may not know what a citation is, let’s look at ways to leverage AI to help people with the law.
From Mark Fucile writing for the Washington State Bar Association/@WAStateBar’s NWSidebar,
“This past month, courts in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho all wrestled with ‘hallucinated’ citations generated by artificial intelligence tools used by pro se litigants.”
Imagine the value if AI drew on the authoritative published works of legal professionals from these three states, rather than making things up. Twenty years of digital publishing (blogs, articles, alerts, website pieces, bar publications) from lawyers, law librarians, academics and other legal professionals.
This isn’t far off. CourtListener from the Free Law Project is already connected to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, giving AI assistants free access to case law. Anthropic named Free Law Project an access to justice partner when it launched Claude for legal. The AI companies understand the needs to help and are willing to so so.
The commentary that explains the law can follow the same path. The Library at LexBlog (“Library”) is aggregating, preserving and structuring this insight from legal professionals so it can flow into AI assistants through a free connector, and through partners working to make access to justice real.
Pair primary law with the commentary of legal professionals, and a person representing themselves gets answers backed by real knowledge, not a guess.