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Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, admitted to citing fake, AI-generated court cases in a legal document that wound up in front of a federal judge, as reported earlier by The New York Times<\/em><\/a>. A filing unsealed on Friday<\/a> says Cohen used Google\u2019s Bard to perform research after mistaking it for \u201ca super-charged search engine\u201d rather than an AI chatbot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The document in question was a motion that asked a federal judge to shorten the length of Cohen\u2019s three-year probation, which he\u2019s now facing following prison time and a guilty plea to tax evasion<\/a> and other charges. But after reviewing the letter brief, US District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in a filing<\/a> that \u201cnone of these cases exist\u201d and asked Cohen\u2019s lawyer, David Schwartz, to explain why the three cases are included in the motion as well as whether his now-disbarred client helped draft it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In response, Cohen submitted a written statement saying he didn\u2019t intend to mislead the court, adding that he used Google Bard to do legal research and sent some of his findings to Schwartz. However, Cohen says he didn’t realize the cases cited by Bard had the potential to be fake, nor did he think Schwartz would add the citations to the motion \u201cwithout even confirming that they existed.\u201d Schwartz facing potential sanctions for including the phony citations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAs a non-laywer I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAs a non-laywer 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 show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not,\u201d Cohen writes. \u201cInstead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n