ChatGPT. A phantom Connecticut appellate cite.
Owen Ehima, the father of a one-year-old, petitioned the Superior Court of Connecticut to change his daughter's surname from Kyne to Ehima. The petition came out of a contentious dissolution with the child's mother, Erica Kyne, who has primary residence of the child. A prior decision had already denied the same surname request for lack of good cause.
The judge found the petition's best-interest arguments were generic claims that could appear in any father's name change petition, drafted by ChatGPT. When the court reviewed Ehima's pleadings from the dissolution case to understand his arguments, it found that cases he cited, including "In re David W., 58 Conn. App. 237 (2000)" and "In re Marriage of Doyle, 190 Conn. 748 (1983)," do not exist and are likely AI hallucinations.
Offered for: a family-law proposition
The court denied the petition for a name change, finding both a procedural bar (the child was never made a party) and a failure to prove the change served her best interest. It also denied the father's related motion for contempt on both grounds. The court did not rely on the nonexistent citations and noted their likely AI origin in a footnote.
Kingsfield returned REJECT. The cited authority is nonexistent and likely an AI fabrication. The court declined to rely on it.
This matter is among the US case-law cases we ran Kingsfield against in the Charlotin benchmark. Kingsfield's existence check confirms every citation against the case-law corpus and an independent source (CourtListener) before any claim resting on it can stand. Across the run Kingsfield ruled 696 of 700 testable claims correctly, including every one of the 504 fabricated citations and 92 fabricated quotes.
Honest scope. This measures Kingsfield's ruling layer given an extracted citation, not an end-to-end run over a full brief. The case record and the AI-tool attribution come from Damien Charlotin's public database and the court order; the verdict is Kingsfield's. See the full 700-claim benchmark.