Don’t be innocent. If you’re a non-lawyer in the 2020s, you may have at least entertained the thought that you could use an LLM to help prosecute a murderous case against someone who has offended you.
Or at least now I know it’s not Now! Me.
Thanks to AI, plaintiffs representing themselves, also known as “pro se” plaintiffs, are changing the legal landscape for the worse, according to a new study by MIT’s Anand Shah and USC’s Joshua Levy, as The New York Times reported on Monday. The study has not yet been peer reviewed.
It said that since the rollout of the widely available LLM, 18 percent of pro se filings now include what authors believe to be AI-generated text. Perhaps as a result, “the total volume of docket entries per court pro se in the first 180 days of a case increased by an average of 64% in the post-AI period,” the study found.
Typically, pro se filings come from prisoners working on their cases from behind bars, but the study notes that “the national non-prisoner pro se filing share rose sharply from its roughly 11% historical steady state to 16.8% in fiscal year 2025, a gain that has no precedent in the 25-year administrative record.”
According to the Times, pro se plaintiffs lost 96% of their cases from 1998–2017.
The Times is highlighting the frivolous lawsuits generated with large-scale AI — and what a waste of time it is for courts to painstakingly read and process all these careless filings. Patrick J., a federal judge in Minnesota. Schiltz called it “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
To illustrate its point, the Times interviewed a man who uses AI to generate lawsuits. This man gave his name to the newspaper, and allowed himself to be photographed for the story. The courts have said some unpleasant things about this man and the Times says he lives in his car. He’s using one of the president’s favorite words, straight from central casting — so much so that the Times story borders on, well, Meaning.
I can’t dispute that AI lawsuits seem like a big problem. At the same time, lawsuits are often the only weapon oppressed Americans have – an alternative to institutions and politicians who actually help make us whole when harm has been done and it is not our fault. Part of me can’t resist reading a David and Goliath story about a rando armed with the cloud who bluffs his way to some life-changing, ten-figure legal wins – possibly after using his LLM to figure out how to argue a case in court.
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