From Newsgroup: comp.ai.philosophy
On 29 Dec 2023, Red Shithole States <
elonx@protonmail.com> posted some news:ummmni$s3g1$
9@dont-email.me:
Welcome to another espisode of New York Shitty City Democrat fuckups.
The latest victim of an AI screw-up? Donald Trump's former fixer Michael
Cohen and his lawyer.
Cohen admitted in a sworn statement in a Manhattan federal court case
that he used Google Bard, a generative AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT, to
find legal cases backing up his arguments for why he should be let loose
early from his supervised release.
But Cohen didn't realize a key AI pitfall: sometimes, it just makes
stuff up.
Cohen wrote that he misunderstood Google Bard as a search engine, not a generative AI service like ChatGPT, and that he trusted his lawyer to
verify the cases.
"I understood it to be a super charged search engine and had repeatedly
used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information
online," Cohen wrote. "I did not know that Google Bard could generate non-existent cases."
Cohen fed Bard's hallucinated results to his lawyer at the time, David Schwartz, who included three of them in his November 29 filing without
checking that the cases were actually legit, according to the court
papers.
The Friday legal filing was first reported by Inner City Press' Matthew
Russell Lee.
Cohen, in the court documents, deflects the blame on his lawyer for not double-checking what he sent.
"It did not occur to me then— and remains surprising to me now—that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed," Cohen wrote in the filing.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and served
time in prison before he was placed on supervised release.
The court filings had argued that he complied with all the terms of
release and that his supervision should now end.
US District Judge Jesse Furman, who's overseeing the case, asked
Schwartz "to explain why he should not be sanctioned for citing cases
that appear not to exist," leading to Cohen explaining his side of the
story.
Schwartz, in his own court filing, said he included the hallucinated
cases as citations because he wrongly understood them to come from
another one of Cohen's attorneys, Danya Perry, rather than Cohen
himself. Perry is still working to try to end Cohen's supervised release
and says he should not suffer for his lawyer's alleged misstep.
The incident could have consequences for one of the criminal cases
against former President Donald Trump.
Cohen is expected to be a star witness in the Manhattan District
Attorney's case against Trump, alleging he falsified business documents
to cover up hush money payments to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016
election.
Trump and his attorneys have long argued that Cohen could not be
trusted, given his criminal history, which also resulted in him losing
his own legal license. With the AI snafu, they may have yet another
example to bring in front of a jury to try to discredit him.
https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-cohen-used-ai-chatbot-to-find- bogus-legal-cases-2023-12
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