Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen admitted to citing fake ai-generated court cases in a legal filing that ended up before a federal judge. ai-fake-cases.html”>As previously reported by The New York Times. TO open presentation on friday says Cohen used Google's Bard to conduct research after mistaking it for “a supercharged search engine” instead of an ai chatbot.
The document in question was a motion asking a federal judge to shorten the length of Cohen's three-year probation, which he now faces after spending time in prison and a guilty plea to tax evasion and other charges. But after reviewing the letter, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman he wrote in a presentation that “none of these cases exist” and asked Cohen's attorney, David Schwartz, to explain why the three cases are included in the motion and whether his now-disbarred client helped draft it.
In response, Cohen submitted a written statement saying he had no intention of misleading the court, adding that he used Google Bard to conduct legal research and sent some of his findings to Schwartz. However, Cohen says he did not realize that the cases cited by Bard had the potential to be false, nor did he think that Schwartz would add the subpoenas to the motion “without even confirming that they existed.” Schwartz faces possible sanctions for including false subpoenas.
“As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology”
“As I am not a lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not know that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could display quotes and descriptions that seemed real but in reality were not,” Cohen writes. “Instead, I understood that it was a super powerful search engine and had used it repeatedly in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”
