By Benjamin Weiser and Jonah E. Bromwich | New York Times
Michael D. Cohen, the onetime fixer for former President Donald J. Trump, mistakenly gave his lawyer bogus legal citations concocted by the artificial intelligence program Google Bard, he said in court papers unsealed on Friday.
The fictitious citations were used by the lawyer in a motion submitted to a federal judge, Jesse M. Furman. Mr. Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and served time in prison, had asked the judge for an early end to the court’s supervision of his case now that he is out of prison and has complied with the conditions of his release.
The ensuing chain of misunderstandings and mistakes ended with Mr. Cohen asking the judge to exercise “discretion and mercy.”
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.”
“This is at least the second known instance of lawyers relying on artificial intelligence services to draft legal briefs, apparently without even confirming that the cited cases exist. While modern AI has the potential to revolutionize aspects of every industry, AI products are tools that must be deployed only for the proper purposes. Using AI tools without understanding their technological limitations can introduce significant legal implications, including breach of confidentiality, violation of professional ethics, and loss of intellectual property protections. Commercially available AI products, such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, are very good at sounding human, but not very good at understanding the substance of the conversation. Companies looking to add AI tools to their workflows should adopt an AI policy to ensure they carefully evaluate the technological limitations and legal risks before incorporating AI into their business.” -Paul Coble, AI-Web3 technology attorney and chair of Rose Law Group’s intellectual property department
