Michael Cohen says he mistakenly gave his lawyer fake legal citations from artificial intelligence tool Google Bard as he sought to beef up his petition for early termination of his supervised release, according to court documents unsealed Friday, reported Forbes.
Cohen, a former lawyer for Donald Trump who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in 2018, in a letter to the court explained 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."
He also said he did not realize that the lawyer filing the motion on his behalf, David Schwartz, "would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed."
Schwartz said he had not independently reviewed the cases because Cohen indicated that another lawyer was providing the suggestions.
"I sincerely apologize to the court for not checking these cases personally before submitting them to the court," Schwartz wrote.
The court threatened to sanction Cohen's lawyer after discovering the cases did not exist.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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