Lawyer Cites ChatGPT-Invented Fake Witnesses in Murder Appeal
A lawyer used ChatGPT to generate briefs that included completely made-up witnesses and testimony while representing a man accused of shooting his wife. When he was caught by the judges, the lawyer blamed it on his own “stupidity.” “It's little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D. Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges.
- ▪A lawyer used ChatGPT to generate briefs that included completely made-up witnesses and testimony while representing a man accused of shooting his wife.
- ▪When he was caught by the judges, the lawyer blamed it on his own “stupidity.” “It's little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D.
- ▪Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges.
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| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/chatgpt-fake-witnesses-testimony-stephen-aarons-new-mexico/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:15:31 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-30T18:17:01.794Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-30T18:17:01.794Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rJCW7xb_vnFN · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A lawyer used ChatGPT to generate briefs that included completely made-up witnesses and testimony while representing a man accused of shooting his wife. When he was caught by the judges, the lawyer blamed it on his own “stupidity.” “It's little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D. Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges. He “assumed” ChatGPT would generate a “bulletproof summary of proceedings.” Instead, ChatGPT generated false testimony from “wholly fabricated witnesses,” according to an order of direct contempt from the New Mexico Supreme Court.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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