Confession in court
Trump’s ex-lawyer: I created false information with AI
December 29, 2023, 10:12 p.m
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Trump’s former lawyer Cohen was sentenced to prison in 2018 for misusing campaign donations. The lawyer wants the case to be closed. The 57-year-old now claims in court that he fabricated false information using a chatbot.
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen admitted in court that he used artificial intelligence to generate false information and passed it on to his lawyer. The 57-year-old used the Google chatbot Bard to find documents for a court case in New York that the software came up with. This emerges from newly released documents from the federal court in Manhattan in which Cohen justifies his behavior.
Cohen told the court in a released affidavit that he was unaware that Google Bard was a text generator similar to ChatGPT. Cohen admitted his mistake after the judge in the case asked for an explanation of a total of three cited cases that he could not find.
Cohen pleaded guilty to violations involving the use of campaign donations for Trump in 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison, but was allowed to serve part of the sentence in house arrest because of the coronavirus pandemic. The incorrect information was now found in Cohen’s request to the court to put the case on file.
It remains to be seen whether the episode will have any impact on a trial currently underway against former President Donald Trump. Cohen testified there as a key witness and is repeatedly portrayed as untrustworthy by the Trump defense.
The new AI programs have immense capabilities – but the way they are programmed makes them susceptible to “hallucinating” supposed facts. Even before Cohen, there had been cases of lawyers who wanted to make their work easier with AI chatbots, but ended up providing incorrect information.