Cohen Gave Lawyer Fake Legal Citations Created By AI

December 29, 2023 News, Politics

The Hill reports:

Michael Cohen, former President Trump’s ex-fixer and personal lawyer, said in newly unsealed court filings that he accidentally gave his lawyer fake legal citations concocted by the artificial intelligence program Google Bard.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman called three case citations into question earlier this month after they were used in a motion to end Cohen’s supervised release early.

In his order directing Schwartz to produce evidence the cases were real, Furman suggested the lawyer could face sanctions. Cohen defended his lawyer in his declaration, asserting the error was an “honest mistake.”

The New York Times reports:



In a sworn declaration made public on Friday, Mr. Cohen explained that he had not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.”

The revelation could have serious implications for the Manhattan criminal case against Mr. Trump, in which Mr. Cohen is expected to serve as the star witness. The former president’s lawyers have long attacked Mr. Cohen as a serial fabulist; now, they will have a brand-new example.

The new information about Mr. Cohen’s role in creating the bogus cases comes after the judge, Jesse M. Furman of Federal District Court, said in an order on Dec. 12 that he could not find any of the three decisions cited by Mr. Schwartz and ordered him to provide copies to the court.

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