AI's Going Great

A lawyer in Florida submitted a brief containing six case citations that don’t exist. When questioned by the judge, the lawyer admitted he’d used ChatGPT to research the brief and hadn’t verified the citations. This marks at least the fifth known instance of AI-hallucinated case law making it into actual court filings.

Researchers discovered that a widely-used AI coding assistant could be tricked into inserting malicious dependencies into projects. The attack works by hiding instructions in README files that the AI reads as context. At least 12 popular open-source packages were affected before the vulnerability was patched.