The Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia fined the lawyer 26 million pesos (about $6,000) Jorge Hernán Zapata Vargas for presenting a judicial appeal that contained non-existent rules and sentences that were generated with artificial intelligence (AI).
The high court certified that none of the sentences cited in the text appeared in official systemsafter which the lawyer himself acknowledged that the inaccuracies were a consequence “possibly of an Artificial Intelligence program that is being worked on in order to speed up the responses and procedures (sic)”, according to the ruling, released this Monday.
The decision determined that the professional incurred “procedural recklessness” by invoking poorly cited articles and non-existent precedents in an extraordinary appeal for review against a ruling by the Superior Court of Villavicencio.
The Court noted that the lawyer breached his professional duty to verify the authenticity of the sources before invoking them and warned that this obligation cannot be delegated, even when technological tools are used.
The ruling also warned about the risk of incorporating into the judicial process what it called “pseudo-law”, that is, non-existent content that has the appearance of real jurisprudence, and stressed that generative language models can produce false, although credible, information.
Consequently, the high court ordered to refer the case to the Sectional Judicial Disciplinary Commission of Bogotá to determine if the lawyer incurred a disciplinary offense and adopt the corresponding sanctions.
The decision constitutes one of the first rulings in Colombia on the liability of lawyers for the improper use of artificial intelligence in judicial proceedings and sets a precedent on the obligation to verify the information generated by these tools.