AI Law Librarians: Charlie Amiot – How We Got Here “Recently I was chatting with a friend from law school who has been a practicing lawyer for seven-plus years and whom I’ve known for 11+ years. I have a great amount of respect for this person’s thoughts and opinions on nearly any subject (admittedly rare for me). I brought general AI usage into the conversation and they told me that they are staying away from AI altogether. The administrative judges in their jurisdiction were moving to ban AI outright. Allegedly this is in response to what the judges were seeing: fake citations, fake cases, fake lawyers in briefs filed with real courts. Due to their particular line of work, they worried that any AI usage in any context could contaminate their work product. They weren’t willing to risk their reputation (or their employer’s reputation), their law license, cases, or income. Instead they chose to take a hardline position as the answer. Most of us have heard the term hallucination and think we know what it means. For purposes of this article: hallucination is the term used to describe a large language model output that contains incorrect information that the model believes is correct. How incredibly human of it. Many in the legal profession point to “hallucinations” as the scapegoat when something goes wrong in their filings. They also often tend to toss their law clerks, paralegals, junior lawyers, and student interns—real and fictitious—under the bus as to who is really at fault for the hallucinations inclusions. Some even blamed deadlines set by the court. A hallucination is simply an incorrect statement. It stands alone. If you happen to be someone who has a set of encyclopedias sitting next to them, you’re undoubtedly sitting next to hundreds of hallucinations, inserted both at the time of print and facts that have mutated with the passage of time since being printed. Any newspaper or magazine you pick up contains a hallucination. Many textbooks and reference materials contain hallucinations as well. Arguably, only in fiction can there be no hallucinations.³ We are otherwise surrounded by and exposed to them on a daily and hourly basis. Continuously pointing to LLM hallucinations allows the word hallucination to do a whole lot of work at getting people off the hook of personal responsibility…”