AI doesn’t need superintelligence to bring America’s judicial system to its knees.
The proliferation of AI-generated slop paraded as legitimate legal documentation is now so bad that Florida’s second-highest appellate is sounding the alarm.
In an opinion issued last week, a panel of three judges for Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal excoriated an attorney whose filings carried the unmistakable imprint of — in the judges’ words — “AI slop.”
That assessment, first reported by Reuters, came along with a notice that the offending attorney might be referred to the Florida bar for discipline, as well as a warning that the kinds of “frivolous, scattershot arguments” generated by AI are causing serious problems for courts’ ability to process cases.
“Pro se litigants and lawyers can easily abuse AI to crank out extensive and confounding documents that cause delay, annoyance, and expense to the other side,” the opinion states. “Busy courts can drown in a flood of filings that are difficult to navigate. Abusive AI filing clogs dockets and undermines the administration of justice. Courts expect more from an attorney.”
As for the attorney in question, the district court found family attorney Jaclyn Soroka had filed a motion which was “legally insufficient, frivolous, and untimely.”
“An AI supercomputer would struggle to find meaning in some of the prose used in this case,” the judges roared. “Counsel’s arguments need to be comprehensible to human readers — the courts, opposing counsel, and the litigants.”
In an interview with Law.com, Soroka denied using any AI to produce legal documents, explaining that “in my practice of law, in all matters, I do not use artificial intelligence to generate court filings.”
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