Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, said he mistakenly passed along fake AI-produced legal case citations to his attorney that were used in a motion submitted to a federal judge.
The cases were cited as part of written arguments by Cohen’s attorney David M. Schwartz, which were made to try to bring an early end to Cohen’s court supervision now that he is out of prison. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance charges, and lying to Congress.
Cohen admitted 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 Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.”
“Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online,” he added.