Liege lawyer uses ChatGPT to draft defence arguments

A lawyer in Liege presented a document generated by the large language model artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT as a "neutral" source for an argument in the trial of a group of suspected cocaine extractors.

The trial relates to the organisation of the extraction of clandestine shipments of cocaine in the Port of Antwerp and other European ports, and the main suspects are faced sentences of up to 20 years in prison.

The drugs are said to have arrived from South America and passed through Belgium, where they were extracted from cargoes in which they were concealed before being transported to the Calabrian mafia.

The 24 defendants, aged between 30 and 75, were charged with importing, exporting, manufacturing and possessing narcotics, participating in a criminal organisation, forging documents and possessing weapons.

Mathieu Simonis, the lawyer for a 38-year-old Kosovar who faced a sentence of 15 years, had asked that the charges against his client be dismissed.

He questioned the legality of the telephone tapping carried out on the SkyECC encrypted messaging system.

Contrary to that of the public prosecutor, his argument focused on the renewal of the investigating judge's authorisations to intercept private communications. These authorisations had not been renewed.

“I consulted a source who is neither a professor of criminal procedure nor connected with the case,” Simonis said.

“It's a neutral source who has analysed the legislation and who indicates that the authorisations must be renewed in time.”

He then revealed that he had consulted ChatGPT anecdotally and had produced the document containing the questions asked and the answers given.