The tool isn’t the problem. An unchecked citation with your name on it is.
Short answer
Yes, subject to disclosure and accuracy duties that fall on the person who signs the document, not on the tool. Every Canadian court that has spoken on this treats AI-drafted material the way it would treat an unchecked draft from anyone else: fine as a starting point, never fine as a filing nobody verified.
Since May 2024, the Federal Court’s notice on AI in court proceedings asks parties to declare, in the first paragraph of a litigation document, when content was “created or generated by artificial intelligence” — either for the whole document or for specifically identified paragraphs. The Court draws its own line around what counts: a declaration is needed when AI content reads like it came from a co-author, not when AI merely suggested edits to something a person wrote and then reviewed.
The Court’s own separate policy on how it uses AI internally states the same discipline applies to its own people: “members of the Court and their law clerks are aware of the need to verify the results of any AI-generated outputs that they may be inclined to use in their work”.
Ontario’s approach runs through the citations rather than a disclosure statement. Its Consolidated Civil Practice Direction requires every factum to include a lawyer’s statement “certifying that the person signing the statement is satisfied as to the authenticity of every authority cited” under Rule 06.1 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, and warns plainly that “it is the responsibility of all counsel and litigants to guarantee accuracy… regardless of whether they directly interacted with the technology”.
Alberta’s Court of Appeal, Court of King’s Bench and Alberta Court of Justice took a third route again in their October 2023 tri-court notice, listed on the Alberta Courts’ own notices index: no declaration requirement at all, only a direction to exercise caution when citing legal authorities or analysis drawn from large language models, and to rely exclusively on authoritative sources for anything put before the court. That means the drafting rule you’re actually bound by depends on which court you’re filing in, not on a single national standard — see must you declare AI use to a Canadian court for the full province-by-province picture.
See is AI-generated evidence admissible for what a court actually does once an unchecked AI citation is caught.
Whether a document, a filing or a claim can be relied on is the same question a diligence review asks of anything else AI touched.
