Normally, you’d imagine huge megacorporations having a personal army of the best lawyers in the world who can spin anything in their favor. You’d certainly think that would be the case for 3M, the industrial conglomerate that got away with permanently poisoning our planet with “forever chemicals.”
But nobody’s perfect all the time. In a lawsuit about who’s liable for a Houston explosion that killed three people, an “expert witness” that 3M’s legal team hired turned out to be a total hack who used AI to put together his entire report defending the company, 404 Media reports.
The opposing legal team suspected AI usage during the discovery phase, and demanded to see the expert witness’ ChatGPT logs. The judge obliged, and 3M’s legal team were forced to turn over 350 pages of his activity on the AI platform — which also, amazingly, contained public links to his full conversations.
The resulting reckoning was brutal. The logs showed that the man, Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering, asked ChatGPT to “create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M,” and that the resulting document should “show how 3M is 0 percent at fault” for the lethal explosion at Watson Grinding, which also destroyed hundreds at homes.
