Michael Cohen said in court papers that he had accidentally given his lawyers fictitious legal citations generated by an artificial intelligence program.
The fake citations were used by Cohen’s lawyer, David Schwartz, in a motion submitted to federal Judge Jesse M. Furman, the New York Times reported Friday. Cohen had asked the judge in the motion for an early end to the court’s supervision of his case, after serving prison time and complying with the conditions of his release, the report said. He pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations.
Cohen said in a sworn declaration that he did not realize that Google Bard was a “generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.” He also said he did not know his lawyer would submit his fake citations to the court without confirming they existed.
