A Man Just Won A Court Case Using ChatGPT

Photo of Christopher Block from his FB page. Photo of ChatGPT by Rolf van Root on Unsplash

For Christopher Brock, ChatGPT isn’t just a cool toy — It’s his personal legal team. After last week’s victory in the courtroom, his $20 a month investment has paid for itself hundreds of times over.

The trouble began in May of last year when Brock decided to build a small shed outside of his house. He lives outside of Cincinnati in an unincorporated part of Hamilton County. He’d seen plenty of similar sheds around his neighborhood and had no reason to believe anyone would hassle him about it.

But one day Brock received a notice that he’d need to secure a zoning permit for his shed. He expected to fill out some forms and pay a small filing fee and return home with his permit in hand. Instead his application was denied and he soon found himself on a year-long campaign to maintain his right to store his stuff.

“I was a person that felt injustice,” said Brock. “We had to fight in two different courts just to be heard.”

The whole process itself is filled with all sorts of bureaucratic twists and turns: starting with the fact that the entire conflict hinged on an anonymous complaint and ending with the final ruling that his 96 sq. Ft shed never needed any permitting in the first place.

After losing a permit hearing, Brock sought out a way to appeal the county’s ruling. Rather than getting to lodge an appeal, the county charged him with a misdemeanor for “constructing a structure without a permit.”

At this point in the story, many of those reading would be looking to hire a lawyer. Others would be dismantling their shed, board by board, wishing they could afford an attorney.

Brock, who runs the Facebook group ChatGPT for business and life decided to ask ChatGPT to help him fight his case.

Others with actual law degrees have tried this approach to theatrically bad results, but Brock was determined to succeed where licensed lawyers before him had failed.

“I don’t think it’s out of touch to use AI,” he said. “I was aware of the areas to be careful of like hallucination in cases.”

The way that tools like Chat-GPT work is essentially auto-correct on steroids. Sometimes those predictions are alarmingly accurate, but sometimes when it doesn’t have enough information accessible to make a solid prediction it will “hallucinate”.

In other words, if Chat-GPT doesn’t actually know the answer you ask it, it may just try to bullshit it’s way out of admitting it doesn’t actually know. This is what is called hallucinations.

“It would cite cases from out-of-state and it would bring up the title and case that appeared to be the most perfect to reference … it sounds great, but looking into it, I couldn’t find some of these cases anywhere,” said Brock. “I did deeper research and I just found that it was making up cases.”

Brock’s breakthrough came when he started feeding the state’s “Attorney’s Guide” into Chat-GPT. Later he used a similar product called Claude 2 that allowed him to actually upload PDFs directly into the chat.

On Tuesday, July 25, he won. Brock sees far reaching ramifications as a result of Chat-GPT’s role in this victory.

“I think it’s going to be a big hit across the entire legal industry,” Brock said. “I think that their billable hours are typically around investigation, research and writing filings. If the AI can compile stuff faster than a person can with knowledge of the subject. … that industry is going to be disrupted.”