Star Witness In Alvin Bragg’s Case Against Trump Used AI To Write Legal Briefs, Cited Fake Court Cases
Harold Hutchison on December 29, 2023
Michael Cohen, a former attorney for former President Donald Trump, accused of citing cases that did not exist in an effort to end his supervised release, says he used Google Bard, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) to do so, according to legal documents.
Cohen’s admission to the use of AI came in a declaration filed by his attorneys Thursday after former President Barack Obama-appointed United States District Judge Jesse M. Furman of the Southern District of New York issued a show cause order on Dec. 12, ordering attorneys for Michael Cohen to provide copies of the decisions or to explain why Cohen’s attorneys should not face sanctions. “As far as the Court can tell, none of these cases exist,” Furman wrote in the order.
“The Court contacted the Clerk of the Court for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, who found no record of any of the three decisions,” Furman added.
Cohen was a star witness for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, testifying before the grand jury that issued an indictment against Trump on March 30 in a case centered around a $130,000 payout to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, during Trump’s successful run for the White House.
“The citations and descriptions came from Google Bard,” Cohen said in the Thursday declaration. “As a non-lawyer, I have 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 Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.”
Cohen received a 36-month sentence on tax evasion charges in December 2018, and was also disbarred.
Trump sued Cohen in April, alleging Cohen violated attorney-client privilege.
Bragg did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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