Michael Cohen/AP Yonhap News
Michael Cohen, a lawyer famous as a ‘fixer’ and confidante of former US President Donald Trump, submitted a false statement to the court to end his probation on charges of tax evasion and breach of fund laws political election.
On the 30th (local time), the Washington Post (WP) reported that Cohen had revealed in documents submitted to the Southern District Court of New York the day before that he had created precedent quotes using Google’s AI chatbot, ‘Bard’. Cohen passed Bard’s quote on to one of his lawyers, David Schwarz, and Schwarz submitted documents containing the quote to the court on Cohen’s behalf.
However, Judge Jay Furman of the Southern District of New York asked for a ‘thorough explanation’, saying, “I can’t really find one of the three cases cited by Schwarz.” Accordingly, Cohen admitted that he was not actually looking for precedents, but simply copied the content generated by AI. “I didn’t realize that Google Bard was a productive text service,” explained Cohen. “Google Bard seemed like another powerful search engine.”
This isn’t the first time a generative AI has created a precedent that doesn’t exist. Last June, lawyers who used ChatGPT to submit documents citing false precedents were fined $5,000. A tech industry official said, “This is what happened when no one really knew how AI worked and people trusted 100% AI solutions,” adding, “This is a typical case of ‘AI hallucination ‘, where lies are answered as if they were real.”
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