Former Trump Attorney Acknowledges AI-Generated Mistakes in Legal Citations
Summary:
Former attorney for Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, admitted to mistakenly providing his lawyer with incorrect legal case citations produced by Google Bard, an AI chatbot. Because Cohen is not currently practiced in the legal field, it was argued that the misinterpreted information should have been assessed prior to being presented in court documents. Earlier this year, another attorney faced critique for using AI to generate unreliable court references. These instances shed light on the challenges and risks involved in using AI for legal research.
Donald Trump's past attorney, Michael Cohen, acknowledged a mistake in providing his lawyer with incorrect case citations, which were accidentally generated by Google Bard, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Cohen, who will take the stand as a witness in Trump's impending criminal trials, admitted in a recent court filing that he sent his attorney, David Schwartz, wrong legal citations generated by the AI chatbot. It was stated, “Numerous false citations - alongside those Mr. Cohen discovered but didn't utilize in the motion - were the output of Google Bard, which Mr. Cohen misconceived to be a top-tier search engine and not an AI service like Chat-GPT.”
However, the contention was made that Cohen, not being an active legal practitioner, merely relayed the information to his counsel, implying it should have been assessed before its inclusion in legal documentation. The assertion read, “Mr. Cohen, not being an active lawyer no longer has the awareness of the risks tied to using AI programs for legal investigations, nor is there an ethical responsibility to validate his research.” The statement reinforced the need for an additional evaluation and concluded, “In essence, Mr. Cohen provided Mr. Schwartz with what he thought were true citations he discovered online. Mr. Schwartz, failing to verify these citations, added them to the motion.”
Notably, confusion over the use of AI has created issues for other attorneys in the past. As reported earlier by Cointelegraph, Steven Schwartz, a lawyer working with a New York legal firm called Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, came under fire for using AI to create incorrect court citations. Despite Schwartz's insistence that it was his first time using ChatGPT for legal research, the presiding judge admonished him stating, "Six of the presented cases seem to be false judicial rulings with fraudulent quotes and internal references.
Published At
12/31/2023 7:16:39 AM
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