Ivana Dukanovic, an associate from Latham & Watkins, the attorney for Anthropic in the lawsuit filed by Concord Music, is taking the blame for the erroneous citation of an article that does not exist, to support the analysis of Anthropic’s own data scientist, Olivia Chen. That article was cited as [bold added to indicate the fictitious authors and title]:
3 See Julien Dutant & Julia Staffel, A Statistician’s Guide to Making Sound Inferences from Noisy Data, 78 American Statistician 437, 437–449 (2024),
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2024.2350445;
Dukanovic explains that: “The first citation in footnote 3 of Dkts. 340-3 (sealed) and
341-2 (public) includes an erroneous author and title, while providing a correct link to, and
correctly identifying the publication, volume, page numbers, and year of publication of, the
article referenced by Ms. Chen as part of the basis for her statement in paragraph 9.”
Editor’s note: In other words, they should have cited or meant to cite:
Owen McGrath & Kevin Burke, Binomial Confidence Intervals for Rare Events: Importance of Defining Margin of Error Relative to Magnitude of Proportion, 78 American Statistician 437, 446 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2024.2350445. (or https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2024.2350445)
Dukanovic explains that this “honest mistake” occurred becaused she tried using Claude to generate a correctly formatted citation: “I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article. Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors. Our manual citation check did not catch that error.” Apparently, the lawyers used Clause to try do this for all the citations, some of which had slight mistakes, too.
Apparently, Claude failed! And the idea of using AI to generate formatted citations for a legal document is wild, though I may be an old school lawyer.
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