The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has fined a lawyer 840 euros for using in an appeal quoted sentences from multiple Supreme Court and Constitutional Court rulings that do not exist, but were invented by an artificial intelligence system.
The Criminal Chamber considers that the conduct of this lawyer does not respond to a simple oversight without consequences - as the interested party tried to argue - but rather "deserves to be classified as a disregard for basic professional duties due to gross negligence, constituting a breach of the duty of procedural good faith and, therefore, of the respect due to the Court" that studied his appeal.
The magistrates who signed this sanction maintain that, at this point, the lawyer should already be aware of "the problem of so-called 'AI hallucinations'," cases in which the computer system consulted invents answers without a real basis.
Therefore, and because the lawyer has not acknowledged his error or apologized, the TSJC considers that what happened cannot be settled with "a mere warning or admonition."
Instead, it imposes a sanction calculated with a criterion that it considers "objective, and at the same time exemplary, because it seeks to teach a lesson to prevent the conduct from being repeated," explains the Chamber.
"The cost that hiring an annual subscription to a specifically legal AI tool, among those available on the market, would have entailed for the lawyer is taken into account, which, had it been used, would probably have avoided the outcome that is now being judged," the ruling reasons.
The TSJC details that basic subscription packages for a professional legal AI tool are available starting at 70 euros per month and establishes a fine equivalent to one year's subscription: 840 euros.
This is not the first case detected in the Canary Islands in which a lawyer includes invented or allegedly AI-generated jurisprudence in an appeal.
Last February, the same Chamber of the TSJC fined a lawyer 420 euros for citing up to 48 false rulings suggested by artificial intelligence.
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