I submitted a comment to the California State Bar's Standing Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct (COPRAC) on its proposed amendments to the attorney ethics rules related to AI. Given the growing epidemic of attorneys submitting AI-tainted filings in court (which I wrote about here last fall), the proposed amendments would require attorneys (as part of the duty of competence) to stay abreast of the benefits and risks associated with AI, and would make clear (as part of the duty of candor) that attorneys have "the obligation to verify the accuracy and existence of cited authorities, including ensuring no cited authority is fabricated, misstated, or taken out of context, before submission to a tribunal, including any cited authorities generated or assisted by artificial intelligence or other technological tools." In my comments, I say that this is a good start, but that the duties of competence and candor should also address the potential for attorneys to be fooled by deepfakes and unwittingly offer them as evidence (or fail to challenge them when the other side tries to introduce them into evidence), a topic I first started writing about nearly seven years ago.
