Trump's ex-lawyer Cohen used Google Bard AI to cite fake court cases

San Francisco, Dec 30

Michael Cohen, a one-time lawyer for former US president Donald Trump, has admitted to using fake, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated court cases in a legal document.

An unsealed court filing revealed that Cohen used Google's AI chatbot Bard to perform research after mistaking it for “a super-charged search engine” rather than an AI chatbot, reports The New York Times.

Cohen “mistakenly gave his lawyer bogus legal citations concocted by the artificial intelligence program Google Bard, he said in court papers unsealed on Friday,” the report mentioned.

In a sworn declaration, Cohen said he had not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realise that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.”

The bogus citations were used by the lawyer in a motion submitted to a federal judge.

The episode may have implications for a Manhattan criminal case against Trump, in which Cohen is expected to be the star witness, said the report.

In October this year, Cohen testified against Trump, saying it was not "Trump vs Cohen but more about his accountability", as more details emerged on his testimony on the New York Fraud trial case that revealed some Trump projects in Russia.

This isn’t the first time AI-generated citations appeared in court.

In June, two New York lawyers were sanctioned and fined $5,000 after including bogus court cases generated by ChatGPT in a legal brief.