Preventing GenAI Hallucinations in Your Legal Department

In recent years, generative AI has made headlines in the legal field, where cases of AI hallucinations have caused significant problems. These hallucinations occur when AI systems generate information that appears plausible but is entirely fabricated.

High-profile incidents in New York and Boston saw attorneys relying on ChatGPT for legal research, only to discover that the caselaw provided didn’t exist. As acknowledged in a blog post by CS Disco, preventing genAI hallucinations in your legal department has become critical.

ChatGPT is a type of genAI that focuses on generating text. It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze training data and identify patterns, which are then used to create new content. This makes ChatGPT particularly prone to hallucinations, which can manifest in several ways: sentence contradictions, prompt contradictions, factual inaccuracies, and random or irrelevant outputs.

The root cause of these hallucinations is how large language models operate. LLMs process vast amounts of data to predict word sequences with the highest probability of being correct rather than understanding the content as a human would. The model may generate incorrect or nonsensical information when the training data is incomplete or biased.

LLMs only predict the ordering of words with the highest success probability. They are not capable of determining accuracy. However, you can prevent genAI hallucinations in your legal department by following these steps: refining results with multiple prompts, being specific in queries, verifying information, asking for sources, and using trusted AI tools.

Users can also assign the AI a specific role, define the audience, and provide feedback to improve the quality of responses. Finally, human oversight remains crucial in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content.