Former Trump lawyer confesses in court: I created false information with AI
December 29, 2023, 10:12 pm Listen to the article
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Trump's former lawyer Cohen was sentenced to prison in 2018 for misusing campaign donations. The lawyer wants the case closed. The 57-year-old now claims in court that he fabricated false information using a chatbot.
Trump's former 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 Google's Bard chatbot to find documents for a New York court case created by the software. This emerges from documents recently released by the Manhattan federal court, in which Cohen justifies his behavior.
Cohen told the court in released testimony that he did not know that Google Bard was a text generator similar to ChatGPT. Cohen admitted his error after the judge in the case asked for an explanation about a total of three cited cases that he was unable to find.
Cohen pleaded guilty to violations involving the use of Trump campaign donations in 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison, but was allowed to serve part of the sentence under house arrest because of the coronavirus pandemic. Incorrect information has now been found in Cohen's request to the court to dismiss the case.
It remains to be seen whether the episode will have any impact on the ongoing trial against former President Donald Trump. Cohen testified there as a key witness and is repeatedly portrayed as untrustworthy by Trump's defense.
New AI programs have immense capabilities – but the way they are programmed makes them susceptible to “hallucinating” supposed facts. Even before Cohen, there have been cases of lawyers who wanted to make their work easier with AI chatbots but ended up providing incorrect information.