Attorney Tyrone Blackburn, who's representing a Diddy accuser, has been condemned by a judge for the mishandling of court documents.
According to Billboard, the lawyer was reprimanded by Judge Leo Gordon on Tuesday (December 16) after fessing up to "fabricated legal propositions derived from generative artificial intelligence" in filing's presented on behalf of his client, Liza Gardner. The woman accused the Bad Boy Entertainment founder of sexual assault in a lawsuit filed in November 2023. Diddy, real name Sean Combs, is currently serving a 50-month sentence after violating two counts of the Mann Act.
"Mr. Blackburn confirmed that he indeed used AI that provided him with hallucinated case law and propositions that he then incorporated into his response brief and that he failed to verify on subsequent review," Judge Gordon wrote. "Despite multiple forms of notice and warning, proper verification did not occur here."
In addition to being required to notify bar associations in both New York and New Jersey about his usage of AI, Blackburn has been ordered to pay a $6,000 fine. The New York-based attorney has already been a cause for concern after using artificial intelligence in other cases, and in June, he was threatened to face sanctions for filing a motion that used "non-existent quotations."
Blackburn was accused of utilizing the technology in another legal dispute involving Fat Joe, where lawyers for the rapper claimed that AI-generated errors were spotted in "at least ten instances." Blackburn pointed at online consultant LexisNexis as the reason for his issues, but the company insisted that the lawyer was "never an authorized user or subscriber" of their platform.
As next steps in Gardner's case have not been unveiled, Diddy continues to face an onslaught of lawsuits, some of which were highlighted in Netflix documentary Sean Combs: The Reckoning.