What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Appellant's opening brief cited cases that do not exist and included AI-generated content (repetitive 'refined' drafts and the statement 'Generative AI is experimental'); the court flagged those non-existent citations as fabricated.

Details

The appellate court observed that the pro se appellant's opening brief cited cases that do not exist and exhibited hallmarks of generation by a large language model (repetitive 'refined' drafts, internal suggestions, and the statement 'Generative AI is experimental'). The court identified the fabricated citations and noted the brief's deficiencies but proceeded to decide the jurisdictional timeliness issue on the merits, affirming dismissal.

Sanction teardown · CA Illinois, USA · 2025-09-12

Nicholas George DiCristina v. The Department of Employment Security, et al.

What happened

In CA Illinois, USA, a filing relied on an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Appellant's opening brief cited cases that do not exist and included AI-generated content (repetitive 'refined' drafts and the statement 'Generative AI is experimental'); the court flagged those non-existent citations as fabricated.

Which AI tool

an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool. Note: Charlotin's public database records tool attribution only where a court order, brief, or reporting on the matter states it explicitly; "unidentified" or "implied" means the record indicates AI use but does not name a specific product — we do not guess.

Outcome

Not specified in source record.

Additional detail

How Citation Safe would have caught this

Citation Safe runs three deterministic layers before a brief is filed: (1) does the citation exist against CourtListener's database of published opinions, (2) if quoted, does that exact language appear in the source, (3) does the cited case actually support the proposition it is cited for. Fabricated case citations fail Layer 1. Fabricated or misattributed quotations fail Layer 2 even when the underlying case is real. Misrepresented holdings — a real case cited for a proposition it does not support — are the target of Layer 3. None of these checks involve asking another language model whether the citation looks right; they are lookups and text-matches against the actual source, which is why a hallucinated citation has to survive a direct lookup against the authoritative source — not another model's opinion — to earn a VERIFIED stamp; our measured false-verify rate is published live at /quality.

Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/789/DICRISTINA_v_THE_DEPARTMENT_OF_EMPLOYMENT_SECURITY.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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