Michael Cohen at Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Michael Cohen was looking for cases to back up his legal claim, so he turned to Google’s AI chatbot, Bard.But the cases were bogus.Cohen’s lawyer never checked that the cases actually existed before mentioning them in court.
The latest victim of an AI screw-up? Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen and his lawyer.
Cohen admitted in a sworn statement to a federal court that he used Google Bard, a generative AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT, to find legal cases backing up his arguments for why he should be let loose early from his supervised release.
But Cohen didn’t realize a key AI pitfall: sometimes, it just makes stuff up.
Cohen wrote that he “misunderstood” Google Bard to be a “super-charged search engine, not a generative AI service like Chat-GPT” and that he trusted his lawyer to verify the cases.
Cohen fed Bard’s hallucinated results to his lawyer at the time, David Schwartz, who included three of them in his November 29 filing without checking that the cases were actually legit, according to the court papers.
The legal filing was released on Friday and first reported by Inner City Press’ Matthew Russell Lee.
Cohen in the court documents deflects the blame back on his lawyer for not double-checking what he sent.
“It did not occur to me then— and remains surprising to me now—that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed,” Cohen wrote in the filing.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and served time in prison before he was placed on supervised release.
Cohen’s current lawyer, Danya Perry is still arguing he should be let go and not suffer for his lawyer’s misstep.