#I'm going to disable reblogs on this so if I need to amend it will not have spread

[carriesthewind]

I am, like probably a lot of other people, here due to the absolute INSANITY of the ChatGPT case, and I’m curious: if the original dude, the one supposedly injured by the airline, loses his case due to all of this, would he theoretically have a lawsuit against ChatGPT? Because afaik there’s nothing on ChatGPT saying “yeah, this thing can just spit out bullshit sometimes,” all of that has been found by people playing FAFO. So his counsel is obviously responsible for just…making up shit, but does ChatGPT potentially hold liability for not disclaiming its product can’t be used this way?

I'm going to be cautious in answering this, because consumer litigation/products liability is NOT one of my practice areas (hell, I might well be missing an entire cause of action). So take everything I say here with many grains of salt (and if someone more familiar with the issues would like to chime in, please do!).

So as far as I understand the issues (again, giant grains of salt), even if he could establish negligence, or (if chatbot is a "product") a defect in the design or the marketing, his big issue would be causation. That is, he would still have to prove the negligence/defect was the actual and proximate cause of his damages (and that there were damages). (Also he would be filing against the makers/distributes of ChatGPT, not the product itself.)

And (again, based on my limited understanding) there would be two enormous hurdles to proving causation:

Proving that the negligence/defect was the reason he lost the case, not because his lawyers fucked up. (Because if I was defending the makers/distributes of ChatGPT in this hypothetical case, one of the first things I would point to is the inevitable sanctions order against the lawyers detailing all their ethical and professional violations.)

Proving that he would have won the case except for the use of ChatGPT. Part of the reason I think this is a different issue from the above, is going back to how this all started: a motion to dismiss by the defendant asserting that the plaintiff's claim was time barred. If the defendant is correct, the plaintiff would not have been able to recover regardless of the use of ChatGPT. The actual and proximate cause of any damages would be the failure to file suit within the necessary time frame (assuming that he could/would have won had the case proceeded).

His much better case in this situation would be a malpractice suit against his lawyers. (Especially because, looking at the docket, it looks like they were the ones (Schwartz in particular) who were representing him when he originally filed a suit back in 2020, and fucked up by not appropriately preserving the case while the defendant was in bankruptcy.)

(Also, I'm going to take this opportunity as an excuse to say to anyone reading this: please don't make assumptions about the plaintiff? As OP states, he was supposedly injured, and we know very little else. Making up facts about what might have happened, or what his motives might be - either in "support" or him or against him - doesn't help. When someone is allegedly injured in an accident, the way our system determines who has to pay - the person who was allegedly injured or the person who allegedly caused the accident - is through the court system. He was/is using the court system as intended. There is absolutely no indication that he did anything wrong here.)