Michael Cohen, the former fixer and lawyer for ex-US president Donald Trump, said on Friday (Dec 29) that he mistakenly gave his attorney David Schwartz fake case citations generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) program that made their way into an official court filing, the news agency Reuters reported. Cohen said in a sworn declaration in a federal court in Manhattan that he did not realise that the citations by Google’s AI chatbot Bard were fictitious.
“Mr. Cohen provided Mr. Schwartz with citations (and case summaries) he had found online and believed to be real. Mr. Schwartz added them to the motion but failed to check those citations or summaries. As a result, Mr. Schwartz mistakenly filed a motion with three citations that—unbeknownst to either Mr. Schwartz or Mr. Cohen at the time—referred to nonexistent cases,” the declaration said.
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“To be clear, Mr. Cohen did not know that the cases he identified were not real and, unlike his attorney, had no obligation to confirm as much. While there has been no implication to the contrary, it must be emphasised that Mr. Cohen did not engage in any misconduct,” it added.
‘Had not kept up with emerging trends…’
Cohen said on Friday that those citations came from his online research and he had not expected Schwartz to “drop the cases wholesale into his submission without even confirming they existed.”
The former Trump lawyer pointed out that he had not kept up with emerging trends and related risks in legal technology and did not realise that Bard “was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.”
“I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz’s filing may have caused,” he further said. In an order, US District Judge Jesse Furman gave Schwartz and prosecutors time until Jan 3 to respond to Cohen’s filing.
Courts grappling with AI’s rapid rise
Reuters reported that courts across the United States are grappling with the rapid rise of AI programs and how to regulate their use in court proceedings.
In June this year, two lawyers in New York were sanctioned for submitting a legal brief that included six fictitious case citations generated by ChatGPT. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan ordered lawyers Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman to pay a $5,000 fine in total.
Judge Castel found that Schwartz and LoDuca acted in bad faith and made “acts of conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the court.”
(With inputs from agencies)
