We are facing a clear example of the dangerous use that can be made of artificial intelligence if there is no minimal knowledge and preparation for it, in a use that could even be the difference between a prison sentence or freedom.
And a very high-profile case in recent hours is that of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, who admits to accidentally using fake court cases generated by artificial intelligencespecifically by Google Bard.
Specifically, Michael Cohen is honest and admits that he fully trusted the artificial intelligence of Google Bard to cite fake court cases that had been simply generated by this AI as an example, but did not exist.
This legal document ended up before a federal judge, according to reports from The New York Times, and it specifies that Cohen used Google’s Bard to conduct research after confusing it “with a super-advanced search engine.”
That document was a motion asking the federal judge to shorten the length of the three-year probation for Cohen, who faces prison terms for tax evasion and other charges.
District Judge Jesse Furman, after reviewing the written letter, stated that none of the cases presented therein existand asked Michael Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, to explain why these three bogus cases were included in the motion.
In the face of such commotion, Cohen himself submitted a written statement saying that he “had no intention of misleading the court” and that he used Google Bard “to conduct legal research,” sending some of his findings to his lawyer.
Cohen admits that he did not realize that those cases cited by the AI “had the potential to be false” nor did he think that his own attorney would add the subpoenas to the motion without confirming that they existed.
“As I am not a lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not know that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could display quotes and descriptions that seemed real but in reality were not,” Cohen writes. “Instead, I understood that it was a super powerful search engine and had used it repeatedly in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”
