Michael Cohen used fake cases created by AI in bid to end his probation; The Washington Post, December 29, 2023

 Pranshu Verma, The Washington Post; Michael Cohen used fake cases created by AI in bid to end his probation

"Michael Cohen, a former fixer and lawyer for former president Donald Trump, said in a new court filing that he unknowingly gave his attorney bogus case citations after using artificial intelligence to create them as part of a legal bid to end his probation on tax evasion and campaign finance violation charges...

In the filing, Cohen wrote that he had not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.” To him, he said, Google Bard seemed to be a “supercharged search engine.”...

This is at least the second instance this year in which a Manhattan federal judge has confronted lawyers over using fake AI-generated citations. Two lawyers in June were fined $5,000 in an unrelated case where they used ChatGPT to create bogus case citations."

Michael Cohen just breached Trump’s GOP stone wall; The Washington Post, February 27, 2019

E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post; Michael Cohen just breached Trump’s GOP stone wall

"Nothing Trump does should surprise us anymore, yet it was still shocking that the man who holds an office once associated with the words “leader of the free world” would refer to a murderous dictator as “my friend.” It’s clear by now that Trump feels closest to autocrats and is uneasy with truly democratic leaders, as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, among others, has learned.

The president’s apparatchiks also gave us an instructive hint as to what an unrestrained Trump might do to the free press. They excluded White House reporters Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press and Jeff Mason of Reuters from the press pool covering the dinner between Trump and Kim for daring to ask inconvenient questions of our country’s elected leader. This wasn’t the work of Kim or Vietnam’s authoritarian government. It was the imperious action of a man who wishes he could live without the accountability that free government imposes...

Their fear that this might happen again is why House Republicans worked so hard to delegitimize Wednesday’s hearing. They and Trump would prefer Congress (and the media) to leave us in the dark. Fortunately, we do not live in North Korea."