Michael Cohen says he unknowingly submitted fake AI-generated legal cases to lawyer
The former Trump attorney sent the bogus citations to a lawyer after mistaking Google Bard for a search engine, his legal team says.
Michael Cohen, a former fixer for Donald Trump, said in a court filing Friday that he accidentally sent his lawyer fictitious artificial intelligence-generated citations that were later submitted to court.
Cohen, who was also an attorney for the former president, said he mistakenly thought that the AI bot Google Bard was a "super-charged search engine" while researching legal cases that would show precedent for eliminating his supervised release.
The cases produced by the artificial intelligence service did not exist, he wrote in a filing first reported by The New York Times.
Cohen was sentenced in 2018 to a three-year prison term followed by three years of post-release supervision for crimes including making secret payments to women who had alleged affairs with Trump, lying to Congress and failing to report income.
Cohen said in Friday's filing that he has “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 Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.”
Rating: 5