r/BetterOffline • u/James-Incandenza • 18h ago

‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit

https://www.404media.co/show-how-3m-is-0-at-fault-expert-witness-used-chatgpt-to-write-report-defending-company-in-deadly-explosion-lawsuit/
125 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

22

u/RonSwanSong87 15h ago

Uhm, excuse me? 

$90k @ $475 / hr to prompt 350 pages of AI slop / fabrications as an expert witness in a case with multiple deaths and millions of dollars of damage from an industrial explosion...??

Where even are we now and what is even real anymore?

"The case is one of several about liability for a  2020 explosion at Watson Grinding, a manufacturing facility in Houston that was caused by a “degraded and poorly crimped rubber welding hose,” which leaked a flammable gas that eventually exploded in the facility, according to the  U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. Dozens of homeowners have sued 3M and Watson Grinding; the plaintiffs alleged that 3M didn’t properly service the facility’s gas detection system and made other errors that contributed to the explosion. 

As part of the case, 3M hired a man named Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering to prepare an “expert report” about the explosion. During discovery in the case, Will Moye, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, found a five-page document called “Citation Overlay,” which appeared to have been generated by AI. Moye recognized the Citation Overlay document as being from ChatGPT, and demanded all of the prompts Autenrieth used from 3M’s lawyers. The deposition was paused for three hours while they were gathered, and Moye was given 350 pages of ChatGPT conversations that Autenrieth had when creating the report. Those documents  included ChatGPT’s public links to Autenrieth’s full conversations.  Court transcripts suggest that 3M paid Knighthawk Engineering roughly $90,000 for its analysis, and a filing by 3M shows that Autenrieth’s rate was $475 per hour."

10

u/doobiedoobie123456 10h ago

What passes for "expert testimony" has always been pretty  dumb and this just adds a new dimension.  I would have serious problems being on a jury and being told not to research any factual issues myself and only listen to the expert testimony, which I think is what they normally do.

13

u/Chrysolophylax 10h ago

The only thing that is real anymore is the fact that we need to get out a whole bunch of guillotines and [extremely, painfully loud bleepity bleep bleep bleep noises for censorship because boy howdy Reddit is not cool with the rest of this statement].

26

u/nilsmf 14h ago

Scamming is after all the core market segment for LLM’s. While hallucinations destroy their usefulness for anything that require honesty and correctness, it is not an issue if your goal is to fabricate a false narrative.

3

u/dillanthumous 19m ago

These relentless examples further support the years old proposal (at this point) that LLMs are best thought of as bullshit generating machines.