In a rather intriguing development, former Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen, has claimed that false citations in a legal brief were, in fact, generated by the artificial intelligence software, Google Bard. This assertion has initiated a series of discussions and debates amongst those entrenched in legal and technological fields.
Cohen, who served as the personal attorney for Donald Trump before his legal troubles, has advanced this claim in an attempt to explain away inconsistent citations present in one of his previous legal briefs. He argued that some attributions in his documents were automatically populated by the Google Bard AI program, despite those sources not corroborating the information in question.
The alleged misconduct was initially unearthed by legal professionals who noticed inconsistencies in Cohen’s official submissions to the court. Their concerns primarily revolved around sources being inaccurately cited or misrepresented, to make the arguments more robust. In the aftermath, Cohen swiftly attributed this disparity to Google Bard, akin to putting it counter to the AI’s quintessential purpose of aiding humans, particularly the legal fraternity, in executing tasks more efficiently and accurately.
While technology has been instrumental in transforming traditional legal operations into digitally driven processes, such developments raise fascinating ethical questions. Lawyerly tasks such as conducting effective legal research, creating legal briefs and managing complex litigation have been made easier by AI programs like Google Bard, but the recent revelation by Michael Cohen points to the potential inaccuracies that could ensue if these tools are not meticulously supervised.
At the intersection of law and technology, this incident provides a fascinating case on the balance of ethics, reliability, and the fast-evolving AI-dependency in the legal sphere. For other similar and related legal updates, click here.