Posted on 12/29/2023 12:09:32 PM PST by ChicagoConservative27
Michael Cohen, former President Trump’s ex-fixer and personal lawyer, said in newly unsealed court filings that he accidentally gave his lawyer fake legal citations concocted by the artificial intelligence program Google Bard.
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman called three case citations into question earlier this month after they were used in a motion to end Cohen’s supervised release early. Cohen pleaded guilty to charges including tax evasion and campaign finance violations in 2018 and served some time in prison.
Cohen wrote in a sworn declaration unsealed Friday that he has not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks)” in legal technology and was not aware that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could create citations and descriptions that “looked real but actually were not.” He instead believed the service to be a “supercharged search engine.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
honestly surprised that the judge noticed.
Oops.
People at my company have also been found out using AI because they are too lazy to produce their own work.
This man does nothing but lie.
He even has his computer make up lies for him—that he is too stupid to know were lies.
how did they get caught?
Not sure but our Legal Department caught it and send out a companywide memo that no AI is to be used at all until further notice.
<img src=”https://imgflip.com/i/3gudp8” alt=”Girl in a jacket” width=”500” height=”600”
Lazy lawyer.
Cohen is probably the dumbest lawyer around.
It looks like AI (Chat) is pretty good at writing legal arguments, but it will just make up cases and statutes. I looked at a summary judgment motion that a friend had used Chat to write. The writing was really good. This was quite used for him since English is not his first be language. It just made up a couple a case citations and two Florida statutes out of thin air. Michael Cohen is just so perfect for this story. Lol.
Presumably, the judge's law clerks, when they tried to look up the specific citations at issue -- that's what law clerks do; judges don't actually just take the advocates' word for any of that stuff -- discovered that the cases to which the putative citations pointed didn't actually exist.
This has emerged, in recent times, as a recurrent problem in the legal arena -- i.e., lawyers blithely relying on AI programs to produce pleadings, which programs, in turn, conjure up non-existent case authorities.
He ought to be a cellmate with Abanotti. Two scumbags.
His alma mater, Thomas M. Cooley Law School, has regularly been called the worst law school in America.
Like ALL comouter programmed results - GIGO - garbage in, garbage out.
“how did they get caught?”
Simple. All the judge or anybody else had to do was look up the citations. One looks up a legal citation by going to the volume number of the reporter in which the case allegedly exists and flipping to the page indicated in the citation. As an example I will use the Federal Reporter Second. A case that doesn’t exist in that reporter, to the best of my knowledge, is Jones v. Williams. It would be cited as follows, “Jones v. Williams, 242 F.2d 348.” That means the case should appear in volume 242 of the Federal Reporter Second at page 348. All the judge needs to do is go to his library, pull out Federal Reporter Second, volume 242 and flip to page 348 to see if that’s there. If not the attorney who submitted it is in line for some serious trouble.
He was so much of a fool and a crook that he didn’t even bother to look up the citations to see if they were real. Being a busy disbarred attorney is no excuse, because every attorney, active, inactive, or disbarred, still knows how to do legal citation and how to check legal citations. It’s a fundamental part of being an attorney.
It’s always been the case that lawyers will give a bunch of citations they see in some article or treatise as standing for a particular point. However, you’re supposed to actually read the case, not just cadge its citation from a secondary work. And it’s not uncommon to find that the cite doesn’t really support the particular point. First time I’ve heard it as an AI-based catch
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