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À partir d’avant-hierArs Technica

Michael Cohen loses court motion after lawyer cited AI-invented cases

Michael Cohen photographed outside while walking toward a courthouse.

Enlarge / Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to former US President Donald Trump, arrives at federal court in New York on December 14, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A federal judge decided not to sanction Michael Cohen and his lawyer for a court filing that included three fake citations generated by the Google Bard AI tool.

Cohen's lawyer, David M. Schwartz, late last year filed the court brief that cites three cases that do not exist. It turned out that Cohen passed the fake cases along to Schwartz, who didn't do a fact-check before submitting them as part of a motion in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

US District Judge Jesse Furman declined to impose sanctions on either Cohen or Schwartz in a ruling issued today. But there was bad news for Cohen because Furman denied a motion for early termination of his supervised release.

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Over a decade later, climate scientist prevails in libel case

Image of a middle-aged male speaking into a microphone against a dark backdrop.

Enlarge / Climate scientist Michael Mann. (credit: Slaven Vlasic)

This is a story I had sporadically wondered whether I'd ever have the chance to write. Over a decade ago, I covered a lawsuit filed by climate scientist Michael Mann, who finally had enough of being dragged through the mud online. When two authors accused him of fraud and compared his academic position to that of a convicted child molester, he sued for defamation.

Mann was considered a public figure, which makes winning defamation cases extremely challenging. But his case was based on the fact that multiple institutions on two different continents had scrutinized his work and found no hint of scientific malpractice—thus, he argued, that anyone who accused him of fraud was acting with reckless disregard for the truth.

Over the ensuing decade, the case was narrowed, decisions were appealed, and long periods went by without any apparent movement. But recently, amazingly, the case finally went to trial, and a jury rendered a verdict yesterday: Mann is entitled to damages from the writers. Even if you don't care about the case, it's worth reflecting on how much has changed since it was first filed.

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Axiom, SpaceX launch third all-private crew mission to space station

A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to begin the Ax-3 commercial crew mission.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to begin the Ax-3 commercial crew mission. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)

For the third time, an all-private crew is heading for the International Space Station. The four-man team lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, kicking off a 36-hour pursuit of the orbiting research laboratory. Docking is scheduled for Saturday morning.

This two-week mission is managed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which is conducting private astronaut missions to the ISS as a stepping stone toward building a fully commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by the end of this decade.

Axiom's third mission, called Ax-3, launched at 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC) Thursday. The four astronauts were strapped into their seats inside SpaceX's Dragon Freedom spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket. This is the 12th time SpaceX has launched a human spaceflight mission, and could be the first of five Dragon crew missions this year.

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Michael Cohen gave his lawyer fake citations invented by Google Bard AI tool

Michael Cohen photographed outside while walking toward a courthouse.

Enlarge / Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to US President Donald Trump, arrives at federal court in New York on December 14, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Donald Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted providing fake AI-generated court citations to his own lawyer, who failed to check whether the cited cases were real before submitting them in a court brief. Cohen said the fake court cases came from Google Bard and that he thought Bard was like "a super‑charged search engine" rather than a generative AI tool.

As previously reported, Cohen's lawyer, David Schwartz, cited three cases that do not exist in a motion seeking early termination of Cohen's supervised release. The fake citations were meant to show previous instances in which defendants were allowed to end supervised release early—two involved fictional cocaine distributors and the other an invented tax evader.

The brief provided case numbers, summaries, and ruling dates for the citations, but the judge determined that the cases never happened. Facing punishment for violating federal rules, Schwartz filed an explanation that apologized "for not checking these cases personally before submitting them to the court," but also blamed "the conduct of his client."

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Science lives here: take a virtual tour of the Royal Institution in London

The exterior of the Royal Institution

Enlarge / The Royal Institution was founded in 1799 and is still located in the same historic building at 21 Albermarle Street in London. (credit: Griffindor/CC BY-SA 3.0)

If you're a fan of science, and especially science history, no trip to London is complete without visiting the Royal Institution, browsing the extensive collection of artifacts housed in the Faraday Museum and perhaps taking in an evening lecture by one of the many esteemed scientists routinely featured—including the hugely popular annual Christmas lectures. (The lecture theater may have been overhauled to meet the needs of the 21st century but walking inside still feels a bit like stepping back through time.) So what better time than the Christmas season to offer a virtual tour of some of the highlights contained within the historic walls of 21 Albemarle Street?

The Royal Institution was founded in 1799 by a group of leading British scientists. This is where Thomas Young explored the wave theory of light (at a time when the question of whether light was a particle or wave was hotly debated); John Tyndall conducted experiments in radiant heat; Lord Rayleigh discovered argon; James Dewar liquified hydrogen and invented the forerunner of the thermos; and father-and-son duo William Henry and William Lawrence Bragg invented x-ray crystallography.

No less than 14 Nobel laureates have conducted ground-breaking research at the Institution over the ensuing centuries, but the 19th century physicist Michael Faraday is a major focus. In fact, there is a full-sized replica of Faraday's magnetic laboratory—where he made so many of his seminal discoveries—in the original basement room where he worked, complete with an old dumbwaiter from when the room was used as a servant's hall. Its arrangement is based on an 1850s painting by one of Faraday's friends and the room is filled with objects used by Faraday over the course of his scientific career.

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Michael Cohen’s lawyer cited three fake cases in possible AI-fueled screwup

Attorney David Schwartz poses for a picture in front of the New York Public Library.

Enlarge / Picture of attorney David Schwartz from his website. (credit: David Schwartz)

A lawyer representing Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen filed a court brief that cited three cases that do not exist, according to a federal judge. The incident is similar to a recent one in which lawyers submitted fake citations originally provided by ChatGPT, but it hasn't yet been confirmed whether Cohen's lawyer also used an AI tool.

"On November 29, 2023, David M. Schwartz, counsel of record for Defendant Michael Cohen, filed a motion for early termination of supervised release," US District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in an order to show cause yesterday. "In the letter brief, Mr. Cohen asserts that, '[a]s recently as 2022, there have been District Court decisions, affirmed by the Second Circuit Court, granting early termination of supervised release.'"

Schwartz's letter brief named "three such examples," citing United States v. Figueroa-Florez, United States v. Ortiz, and United States v. Amato. The brief provided case numbers, summaries, and ruling dates, but Furman concluded that the cases are fake.

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