Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's former fixer and lawyer, said in court papers unsealed on Friday (Dec 29) that he mistakenly gave his attorney fake case citations generated by an artificial intelligence programme that made their way into an official court filing.
Cohen, who is expected to be a star witness against Trump at one of the former president's criminal trials, said in a sworn declaration in federal court in Manhattan that he did not realise the citations generated by Google Bard were fictitious.
Google Bard is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Alphabet Inc's Google. The case citations were included by an attorney for Cohen in a motion seeking an early end to his supervised release following Cohen's imprisonment for campaign finance violations.
US District Judge Jesse Furman earlier this month said three court decisions cited in the motion did not exist. He directed Cohen's lawyer, David Schwartz, to demonstrate why he should not be sanctioned for citing non-existent cases.
Cohen, who was disbarred nearly five years ago, in Friday's filings said those citations came from his own online research and that he had not expected Schwartz to "drop the cases wholesale into his submission without even confirming they existed."
Cohen said he had "not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realise that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not."
"I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz's filing may have caused," Cohen said in the filing.
Furman in an order on Friday gave Scwhartz and prosecutors until Wednesday to respond to Cohen's filing. A spokesperson for Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams declined to comment. Schwartz's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
Courts nationally are grappling with the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence programs like OpenAI's ChatGPT and how to regulate their use in court proceedings.
Two New York lawyers were sanctioned in June for submitting a legal brief that included six fictitious case citations generated by ChatGPT.
Cohen was recently a witness in New York state Attorney General Letitia James' civil fraud case against Trump.
Cohen is expected to also testify in the state criminal case against Trump that accuses him of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements to Cohen for a US$130,000 (S$171,000) payment to silence porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.
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