Former lawyer Michael Cohen has informed a federal judge that the nonexistent cases cited in a legal brief were generated by Google Bard, an artificial intelligence program.
Cohen, who had been disbarred, was asking for his supervised release to end early. He looked for supporting cases in Google Bard, which he later said in a sworn declaration he had taken for a supercharged search engine, and passed what it produced to his lawyer, David Schwartz. Schwartz put them in the brief without checking, believing another lawyer had supplied them. Judge Jesse Furman found none of the cases exist. He declined to impose sanctions while calling the episode embarrassing and negligent. The chain is the useful part: neither man believed he was the one responsible for verification, because each thought the other had already done it, and the tool sat at a point in the process where nobody had been assigned that job.
