A federal judge in Alabama fined attorney James Johnson $5,000 and issued a formal reprimand after court filings he submitted included bogus case citations generated by artificial intelligence. U.S. District Judge Terry Moorer criticized the conduct as more than reckless, ordering Johnson to notify current and future clients and referring him to a court advisory panel that could remove him from the list of lawyers eligible for court-appointed criminal cases. The judge said modest penalties have failed to deter an uptick in AI-related citation errors nationwide and warned that improper reliance on generative tools persists despite well-known risks of “hallucinated” authority. Johnson’s client in a high-profile drug case requested to proceed without him, and the court granted the request.
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