The night before Will Moye was set to face 3M in court over a 2020 gas explosion at a Houston manufacturing plant that killed three and damaged hundreds of homes and businesses, the attorney received a report from the company’s independent expert witness.

Skimming on his iPad, Moye noticed telltale signs of AI: strange formatting and fonts and time stamps showing that 14,500 pages were assembled in a matter of hours. Moye suspected that the author, Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering, lacked expertise and had relied on ChatGPT, despite billing 3M $90,000 for a report arguing the company was not liable.

Autenrieth’s chat logs, which Moye requested and shared in court, show he prompted ChatGPT, “What am I looking at?” after uploading a picture of the gas detector at the heart of the case.