Ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen accidentally cited in artificial intelligence-generated fake court case

Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen admitted to citing artificial intelligence-generated false court cases in a legal filing that was eventually presented to a federal judge, it was earlier reported. New York Times. A document released Friday said Cohen mistook Google’s Bard for a “super search engine” rather than an artificial intelligence chatbot and then used it to conduct research.

The filing was a motion asking a federal judge to shorten Cohen’s three-year probation, which he now faces after serving time and pleading guilty to tax evasion and other charges. But after reviewing a summary of the letter, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in a filing that “none of these cases exist” and asked Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, to explain why the three case was included in the motion, and whether he is now — the disbarred client helped draft the bill.

In response, Cohen submitted a written statement saying he did not intend to mislead the court, adding that he used Google Bader to conduct legal research and sent some of his findings to Schwartz. However, Cohen said he was unaware of the possibility that the cases cited by Bader were false, nor did he believe Schwartz would have added the citations to the motion “without even confirming their existence.” Schwartz faces potential sanctions for including false citations.

“As a non-lawyer, I was not up to speed on emerging trends in legal tech (and the associated risks), nor was I aware that Google Bard was a generated text service that, like Chat-GPT, could display content that looked real but wasn’t. True quote and description. Not actually,” Cohen wrote. “Instead, I view it as a powerful search engine and have used it on many other occasions to (successfully) find accurate information online.”