An Expert Billed $475/Hour for 3M, but ChatGPT Wrote the Report

The deadly 2020 explosion at the Watson Grinding plant in Houston killed three people, damaged around 200 homes, and unleashed a wave of lawsuits accusing conglomerate 3M of failing to maintain critical gas detection safeguards.

To build an ironclad defense, 3M paid engineering consultancy Knighthawk Engineering $90,000, bringing in technical specialist Josh Autenrieth at a rate of $475 per hour to produce an independent safety assessment.

Rather than running deep forensic simulations, Josh Autenrieth uploaded hundreds of sensitive case records directly into ChatGPT and explicitly instructed the bot to generate a conclusion proving 3M was "0% at fault". He also made sure to ask the AI to write glowing remarks about his own qualifications to burnish the report's credibility.

The language model generated a 30-page technical brief, but even ChatGPT showed more legal caution than the expert, prompting him to cut the phrase "0% responsible" because it would make an easy target for opposing lawyers. Autenrieth then had the bot grade his document (scoring it 97 out of 100) and list the top five vulnerabilities the prosecution might attack.

The strategy imploded when plaintiff attorney Will Moye flagged machine-generated patterns in the submission and successfully demanded the full prompt history, yielding 350 pages of chat transcripts.

While 3M attempted to withdraw their expert, the prosecution called him directly to the stand, prompting the jury to slap the company with a fresh $61 million damages award on top of previous multi-million settlements.

Outsourcing forensic analysis to a chatbot works seamlessly until an entire courtroom gets to read the prompts that cost $475 an hour to type.

Source: 404 Media