OAN’s Michaelangelo Hernandez
5:15 PM – Friday, December 29, 2023
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was caught red handed and admitted to giving his lawyer AI generated legal citations he obtained by using Google Bard while filing to have his probation shortened.
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In court filings unsealed on Friday, Cohen admitted to using the AI program after the court threatened to sanction his counsel, David Schwartz, upon finding out the cases referenced in his request files did not exist.
Cohen said he had not kept up with “emerging trends” and the risks that come with using AI software. He added that he trusted his lawyer to “vet” any suggestions he made prior to filing.
“As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not,” Cohen said. “Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”
This is not the first time that the disgraced ex-lawyer has had a run in with the law. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion for his alleged part in arranging payouts for Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in order for them to keep their reported relationship with the former president a secret.
For his punishment, Cohen served a three-year prison sentence. He is currently in the middle of his three-year term of supervised release.
Cohen used to have a close relationship with his former client Donald Trump. However, their relationship soured when Cohen shifted positions, becoming a key witness in the Manhattan criminal trial that targeted the Republican president.
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