$18.3 million. That's 3M's slice they'll pay for trusting a $90,000 "expert" ...

$18.3 million. That's 3M's slice they'll pay for trusting a $90,000 "expert" who outsourced his judgment to ChatGPT.

3M hired him to defend it in a lawsuit over a Houston factory explosion that killed three people. He'd sold himself as a gas-detection specialist, 20-plus years in the industry. Then, writing the report, he uploaded a photo of the gas detector the whole case turns on and asked ChatGPT: "what am i looking at in terms of gas detection system."

The rest of the report went the same way. He prompted the model to "show how 3M is 0% at fault" and let it write. Those conversations were discoverable. 350 pages of them surfaced in his deposition, and at trial he admitted the report was "85 to 90 percent ChatGPT."

The plaintiff's lawyer summed it up: "ChatGPT was the expert in the case." 3M ended up carrying 30% of a verdict north of $61 million.

The danger with AI was never that it hands you a wrong answer. It's that it will confidently hand you exactly the answer you asked for, and leave a paper trail proving you asked.

I wrote up what every business owner should actually take from this