Photo: Canadian Press
Michael Cohen has arrived at the New York Supreme Court for former President Donald Trump’s civil business fraud trial in New York.
michael coenDonald Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer says he unknowingly gave his lawyer a fake artificial intelligence-generated case citation obtained online before submitting it to a judge. .
Cohen made the confession in court documents released Friday in Manhattan federal court after a judge asked his lawyer to explain the incident earlier this month. non-existent court ruling Cited in a motion filed on Cohen’s behalf. Judge Jesse Furman also asked what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played in drafting the motion.
The AI-generated lawsuit was cited as part of written arguments by attorney David M. Schwartz to get Cohen’s court supervision ended early after he served more than a year in prison.Cohen had plead guilty In 2018, in addition to tax evasion and campaign finance charges, Trump falsely told Congress that he directed hush money payments to a porn actor and a former Playboy model to avoid damaging the 2016 presidential election. Ta.
Cohen, who was disbarred five years ago, said in a statement to a judge Thursday that he conducted research through Google Bard to find the citations, but that the service could generate cases where none existed. He said he didn’t know it existed. He said he relies on the Internet for research because he no longer has access to formal legal research sources.
“As a non-lawyer, I can’t keep up with new trends in legal technology (and the associated risks), and Google Bard is a generated text service that, like Chat-GPT, can display authentic-looking quotes and explanations. I didn’t know there was, but it wasn’t,” Cohen said. “Instead, I have found it to be a powerful search engine and have used it repeatedly in other situations to (successfully) find accurate information online.”
Google rolls out Bard In response to ChatGPT, which Microsoft integrated earlier this year. Bing search engine. Although this tool can quickly generate text based on prompts from the user, make things upalso called “hallucinations”.
Mr. Cohen accused Schwartz, an attorney and longtime friend, of not checking the validity of the citations before submitting them to the judge, but he said that not checking the citations was “honest.” “This was a huge mistake,” he said, asking the judge to show Schwartz mercy. “It was a product of carelessness and there was no intent to deceive.”
Schwartz, a former federal prosecutor and now in private practice, said in a statement to the court that he had drafted documents he would submit to a judge to get Cohen off probation early. He said he believed the matter was reviewed by E. Danya Perry, who is also his attorney. He said he never reviewed what appeared to be another attorney’s investigation.
Mr. Schwartz’s claim that Mr. Perry “came to believe” the quote from Mr. Perry was “false” after reviewing court filings and discovering that the cited lawsuit was bogus. “I believe it is false and far-fetched as I was not involved in any of the incidents,” he said. I did not communicate directly with Mr. Schwartz or his paralegal, or even indirectly through Mr. Cohen. ”
When Perry learned of this, he reported the false case citation to the judge and federal prosecutors.
Perry wrote in his submission to the judge: Mr. Cohen did nothing illegal and should not be collateral damage from Mr. Schwartz’s missteps. ”
While discussing possible sanctions earlier this month, the justices noted that this is the second time this year that a Manhattan federal judge has faced off with a lawyer over fake citations generated by artificial intelligence. Two attorneys in unrelated cases were fined $5,000 for citing bogus cases, including: Invented by ChatGPTa chatbot that utilizes AI.
In entering his 2018 guilty plea, Mr. Cohen did not even name the two women he received hush money from or Mr. Trump, instead calling him an “unnamed candidate” to influence the 2016 election. He recalled that he cooperated. But the amount and date are the same as the $130,000 paid to porn actor Stormy Daniels and a Playboy playmate to buy her silence in the weeks and months leading up to the presidential election, which Republican Trump won over Hillary. It matched the $150,000 paid to Karen McDougall. Clinton, Democrat. Ms. Daniels and Ms. McDougal claimed they had an affair with Mr. Trump, which Mr. Trump denied.
Earlier this year, Trump pleaded not guilty in New York state court in Manhattan. 34 felonies He alleges that he falsified internal business records at his private company to conceal his involvement in the payments.
After his arrest, President Trump said in a speech: “This bogus case was brought solely to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election and must be dropped immediately.”
He later pleaded not guilty to three other criminal charges.
