Pro Se Appellant Sanctioned for Citations to Fictitious AI-Generated Cases
By Ke Liu (Kevin), Pilgrim Christakis LLP
On February 13, 2024, the Missouri Court of Appeals dismissed a pro se appellant’s appeal and entered sanctions against the appellant for, among other things, citing fictitious cases generated by artificial intelligence.
In the trial court, the appellee Molly Kruse filed suit seeking unpaid wages. The court granted summary judgment in Kruse’s favor, leading to appellant Jonathan Karlen’s pro se appeal. On appeal, Kruse moved to strike Karlen’s opening brief for failure to comply with various requirements of appellate procedure in Missouri. The appellate court noted numerous inadequacies with the brief, including the fact that it was not signed, there was no appendix, the statement of facts did not cite to the record, the table of contents and table of authorities were inaccurate, and the brief did not include a “points relied on” section summarizing the challenged ruling and the legal reasons for why the ruling should be reversed.
Beyond these issues, however, the appellate court specifically highlighted the fact that nearly all of the case citations in Karlen’s brief were fictitious and generated by artificial intelligence: “Particularly concerning to this Court is that Appellant submitted an Appellate Brief in which the overwhelming majority of the citations are not only inaccurate but entirely fictitious. Only two out of the twenty-four case citations in Appellant’s Brief are genuine.” The court noted that although some of the fictitious cases cited by Karlen had real case names—which the court characterized as “presumably the product of algorithmic serendipity”—none stood for the propositions asserted by Karlen.
