by Michael Cohen admitted to thinking that AI chatbot Google Bard was a more precise “supercharged search engine” than other generative AI services.
Michael Cohen, a former lawyer of Donald Trump, confessed to mistakenly giving his attorney
incorrect case citations created by the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Google Bard.
In a recent court filing, Michael Cohen, who is set to be a witness against Trump in his upcoming
criminal trials, admitted to sending Google Bard-generated legal citations to his lawyer, David Schwartz, in support of his case.
“The invalid citations at issue—and many others that Mr.
Cohen found but were not used in the motion—were produced by Google Bard, which Mr.
Cohen misunderstood to be a supercharged search engine, not a generative AI service like Chat-GPT.”
However, it was argued that Cohen is not an active legal professional, and was only passing on
the information to his attorney, suggesting the information should have been reviewed before being included in official court documents.
“Mr. Cohen is not a practicing attorney and has no concept of the risks of using AI services for
legal research, nor does he have an ethical obligation to verify the accuracy of his research,” the statement further stated, reiterating further review was required:
“To summarize: 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.”
This isn’t the first instance of a lawyer being exposed for relying on AI, only to realize it generated inaccurate results.
Earlier this year, Cointelegraph reported that Steven Schwartz, an attorney with the New York law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, faced criticism for using AI in creating what turned out to be false court citations.
Despite Schwartz claiming it was his first time using ChatGPT for legal research, the judge strongly critiqued him for the inaccuracies:
“Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,” the judge stated.
