A Manhattan lawyer who represents co-defendant Terrance Dixon in rapper Fat Joe's defamation lawsuit is denied leave to correct a court document filled with AI-spewed citation errors.
Lawyer Tyrone Blackburn, who also represents his own law firm in the case, admitted to having put bad legal citations in the document that seemed to have been generated by artificial intelligence. He asked to have a new version of his initial motion to dismiss that has been corrected.
In his court filing, Blackburn said, "A number of inadvertent citation inaccuracies" were found by his staff, and the new motion was required "for clarity and accuracy in the record."
He contended the mistakes were not intentional and did not undermine the legal basis of his arguments.
"The mistakes didn't affect the core of the legal argument," he asserted, requesting the court to ignore the defective filing.
Yet the request was denied by U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon, observing that Fat Joe's legal team had already filed an opposition on the basis of the initial filing.
Read more: Fat Joe Hits Back Hard With $15M Suit Against Alleged Extortionists Over Fake Sex Trafficking Claims
She ordered Blackburn to resolve the problems in the citations in his upcoming reply brief instead of filing a new amended motion.
Multiple inconsistencies had already been raised by Fat Joe's lawyers, with their opposition filing that the filing contained,
"Misrepresentations and fabrications of legal authority clearly generated by AI," such as "at least ten instances" of entirely fictional or "at least ten instances" case law.
The Bronx-born rapper is suing Blackburn and Dixon for defamation, alleging that they tried to extort him by making false statements, including very serious charges of sexual abuse and taking part in murder-for-hire schemes.
Fat Joe's attorneys denounced the filing as "Fundamentally untrustworthy" and criticized Blackburn for "irresponsibly rely[ing] on artificial intelligence-generated content without manual verification."
They urged the court to consider sanctions, stating that the AI usage "overshadows Defendants' substantive arguments."
This is not Blackburn's first AI-related controversy. In a separate defamation case involving pastor T.D. Jakes, U.S.
District Judge William Stickman fined Blackburn over $76,000 after finding similar false citations and fabricated quotes.
Judge Stickman called Blackburn's conduct "clear ethical violations of the highest order."
Blackburn earlier asserted he enrolled in AI education courses, but critics say the Fat Joe case is representative of a continued pattern of disrespect for legal standards.
Judge Rochon has yet to make a ruling on the motion to dismiss.
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