Spot the Fake: Real or AI-Hallucinated Canadian Case Citation?

An interactive quiz on AI-hallucinated case law in Canadian courts

Spot the Fake is a free interactive quiz that tests your ability to identify AI-hallucinated case citations in Canadian legal submissions. Players are presented with fifteen case citations drawn from Canadian courts and tribunals. Some are real decisions. Others are fabrications generated by artificial intelligence and submitted to courts as if they were real authority. Your task is to swipe right for real citations and swipe left for fake ones.

Why fictitious citations matter in Canadian law

As of 2026, Canadian courts have identified AI-hallucinated case citations in over 145 documented decisions across more than 44 courts and tribunals. Self-represented litigants and counsel are submitting AI-generated authorities they have not verified. When a fictitious citation enters the record unchecked, it can shape arguments, responses, and ultimately judicial reasoning.

How the quiz works

Each citation appears as a card. Read the citation. Decide whether it is real or fake. After each answer, you see whether you were correct and where the citation actually appeared in the Canadian case record. At the end, review every citation with full explanations.

About Courtready

Spot the Fake is built by Courtready, a Canadian legal technology platform. The underlying research on fictitious citations was conducted by Tom Macintosh Zheng and published through CanLII as 2026 CanLIIDocs 738. The full dataset is published as the Canada AI-Hallucination Cases Database at courtready.ca/fictitious-citations-in-canadian-courts.

CTLC 2026

Real or
Fake?

Welcome to CTLC 2026. Here are fifteen citations from Canadian courts and tribunals. Some are real, and some are fake. Let’s put your knowledge of the law to the test.

How it works
1.
Read each citation. Decide whether it is real or fake.
2.
After each card, see the answer and where the case was actually cited.
Swipe left = Fake
Swipe right = Real
Before you begin

Who’s playing?

Your name is for the leaderboard. Nothing else is collected.

Citation
1 / 15
Score
0
Streak 0
← Fake  ·  → Real
Card 1 of 15
Correct
Fictitious
The answers
Every citation, with sources for the fictitious ones.
Your score
0 / 15
—
Why this matters

If you don’t catch them, who will?

Every fictitious citation you just saw was submitted to a real Canadian court or tribunal as genuine authority. Spotting them by eye is harder than it looks, and you just found out why. The cases are being tracked.

The research
The Canada AI-Hallucination Cases Database records decisions where fictitious citations reached a court or tribunal.
Each entry is sourced to the decision that caught it, with the paragraph reference.
Free and open to researchers, counsel, and journalists.
View the research→
Courtready · courtready.ca/ctlc Don’t let fake cases become real law.
The Leaderboard
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