Don’t play innocent. If you’re not a lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least thought you could use your LLM to help you build a killer case against someone who pissed you off.
Or at least now I know it isn’t just i.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, self-represented litigants, also known as “pro se” litigants, are changing the legal landscape for the worse. new research Anand Shah of MIT and Joshua Levy of USC, This was reported by the New York Times on Monday. The study has not yet been reviewed.
It is reported that since the introduction of widespread LLMs, 18 percent of dissertations now contain AI-generated text from authors. Perhaps as a result, “the total volume of pleadings filed in the first 180 days of a case increased by an average of 64% in the post-AI period.”
Typically, criminal case filings come from inmates serving time behind bars, but the study notes that “the national non-inmate case file share increased sharply to 16.8% in FY 2025 from a historical steady state of about 11%, an unprecedented gain in 25 years of administrative filings.”
According to the Times, plaintiffs lost 96% of their jobs between 1998 and 2017.
The Times highlights frivolous lawsuits, mostly created by artificial intelligence, and what a waste of time it is for the courts to painstakingly read and process all these frivolous documents. A Minnesota federal judge named Patrick J. Schiltz called it “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
To illustrate their point, the Times interviewed a man who used artificial intelligence to create lawsuits. This person gave his name to the paper and allowed his picture to be taken for the story. Courts claimed there were some unsavory things about the man, and the Times said he lived in his car. he to use one of the president’s favorite termsstraight from central casting—so much so that the Times story borders on, well, to say.
I can’t argue that AI lawsuits sound like a big deal. At the same time, lawsuits are often the only weapon of downtrodden Americans — a reprieve from the institutions and politicians who help make us whole when we’re hurt and it’s not our fault. One part can’t help but read a David and Goliath story about a Claude-armed rando who leads a life-changing, ten-figure legal victory – presumably to figure out how to argue a case in the courtroom after using his LLM.
