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Here we go again, but this time on a grander and more dramatic scale:

Pras Michel of Fugees seeks new trial, contends former attorney used AI for closing argument

The hip-hop artist convicted on campaign finance and foreign influence charges seeks to set aside the jury’s guilty verdicts.

By Josh Bernstein, Politico (1016/23)

Notice the high stakes of this trial, since the defendant, among many other serious, wide-randing charges, is accused of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for China.

Fugees star Pras Michel, who was convicted in April on charges of conspiring to make straw campaign donations, witness tampering and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for China, appears to be breaking new legal ground by calling for a new trial by claiming his defense attorneys allegedly relied on artificial intelligence to compile their final argument for the jury.

In a withering motion filed Monday night with a federal judge in Washington, Michel’s new attorneys argued that his Los Angeles-based lawyer David Kenner relied on the fledgling technology at critical points in Michel’s trial, contributing to “prejudicial ineffective assistance of counsel.”

As soon as I saw David Kenner's name and photograph bruited in this case, I thought, "Isn't he one of the most prominent celebrity lawyers in LA?"

Indeed, he is.  See here and here.

Kenner “used an experimental artificial intelligence (AI) program to draft the closing argument, ignoring the best arguments and conflating the charged schemes, and he then publicly boasted that the AI program ‘turned hours or days of legal work into seconds,’” Michel’s new defense team from D.C.-based ArentFox Schiff wrote. “It is now apparent that Kenner and his co-counsel appear to have had an undisclosed financial stake in the AI program, and they experimented with it during Michel’s trial so they could issue a press release afterward promoting the program — a clear conflict of interest.”

“Michel’s prior publicist also informed members of the current defense team that Kenner proudly stated at the end of the trial words to the effect of ‘AI wrote our closing,’” former federal prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg wrote in a declaration accompanying the motion.

Zeidenberg pointed to a press release a firm called Eyelevel appears to have issued in May, which included a photo of Michel and boasted that the company’s technology “made history last week, becoming the first use of generative AI in a federal trial.” The release quotes Kenner calling the AI tool “an absolute game changer for complex litigation.”

The announcement does not mention that, after a three-week trial featuring a diverse set of witnesses ranging from Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, jurors took less than three days to convict Michel on all 10 felony charges he faced.

…

Federal prosecutors claimed Michel took staggering sums of money — about $88 million — from wealthy Malaysian businessman Jho Low in a bid to enhance his influence in the U.S. and later to derail the investigation and prosecution of Low on fraud charges stemming from the collapse of Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MBD. The hip-hop star who came to prominence in the 1990s was accused of arranging to donate money from foreign nationals to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 and making intensive efforts to influence President Donald Trump’s administration to drop or resolve the charges against Low.

…

The new lawyers also say Kenner was “deficient” by failing to seek separate trials for Michel on the straw donation charges related to the Obama campaign and the foreign-influence related charges from the Trump era. That decision may have been influenced by a “flat fee” Kenner agreed to with Michel, the new-trial motion says.

“Michel’s counsel was deficient throughout, likely more focused on promoting his AI program and saving himself from the contempt proceeding than zealously defending Michel,” Zeidenberg wrote.

Another article on the case provides additional details:

Star Hip Hop Lawyer Accused of Using AI in Big Case He Lost

He is also accused of violating a court order by sharing confidential information with the media.

Noah Kirsch, Daily Beast (10/17/23)

One wonders how Kenner ever climbed to such heights of the legal profession if he were so sloppy and lazy as he seems to have been in this case:

Star lawyer David Kenner—known for representing hip hop artists Snoop Dogg and Suge Knight—is accused of making several giant lapses during the conviction of his latest major client.

In a motion for a new trial filed on Monday evening, new attorneys for Fugees rapper Pras Michel blasted Kenner as unprepared and unscrupulous. Among their most startling claims: that Kenner used an “experimental” artificial intelligence program to help draft his closing argument in the trial. They said the program didn’t even perform its job well.

Later, the new defense team said, they became aware that Kenner had “a financial interest in the AI program.” He even offered a quote for a press release promoting the new technology, saying, “This is an absolute game changer for complex litigation…The system turned hours or days of legal work into seconds. This is a look into the future of how cases will be conducted.”

Michel was convicted in the spring on 10 counts, including for “orchestrating an unregistered, back-channel campaign” to try to persuade the Trump administration to drop an inquiry into a Malaysian businessman, Jho Low, who was accused of perpetrating a massive fraud scheme. Michel was also accused of working with Low on improper political contributions and lying to the Federal Election Commission about it.

His attorneys now assert that, because of Kenner’s allegedly poor representation, he “never had a chance.”

The implications of this case are vast.  Not only did Kenner admit that he used AI to prepare his case, he bragged about it, as though it were some positive, new development in the practice of law.

Selected readings

• "AI and the law" (10/15/23)
• "ChatGPT does Emily Dickinson writing a recipe for Pad Thai (and haiku too)" (6/9/23)
• "Pablumese" (3/22/23)
• "The mind of artificial intelligence" (3/22/23)
• "Style? Stance? What?" (10/27/18)
• "An example of ChatGPT 'hallucinating'?" (4/16/23)
• "Desultory philological, literary, and historical notes on Xanadu" (4/4/23)
• "Hallucinations: In Xanadu did LLMs vainly fancify" (4/3/23)
• "Detecting LLM-created essays?" (12/20/22)
• "Alexa down, ChatGPT up?" (12/8/22)
• "Bing gets weird — and (maybe) why" (2/16/23)
• "ChatGPT-4: threat or boon to the Great Firewall?" (3/21/23)
• "ChatGPT writes VHM" (2/28/23)
• "ChatGPT: Theme and Variations" (2/21/23)
• "GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-Trained Model" (1/25/2023)
• "ChatGPT writes Haiku" (12/21/22)
• "Artificial Intelligence in Language Education: with a note on GPT-3" (1/4/23)
• "DeepL Translator" (2/16/23)
• "Uh-oh! DeepL in the classroom; it's already here" (2/22/23)
• "This is the 4th time I've gotten Jack and his beanstalk" (3/15/23)
• "ChatGPT does cuneiform studies" (5/21/23)
• "The perils of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the PRC" (4/17/23)
• "Vignettes of quality data impoverishment in the world of PRC AI" (2/23/23)
• "Translation and analysis" (9/13/04)
• "Welcome to China" (3/10/14)
• "LLMs as coders?" (6/6/23)
• "ChatGPT has a sense of humor (sort of)" (6/10/23)
• "The AI threat: keep calm and carry on" (6/29/23)

[Thanks to Kent McKeever]

October 19, 2023 @ 2:52 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Artificial intelligence, Language and the law

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