A court gavel creating ripples on a grid-like digital surface, symbolizing the impact of legal decisions in AI

This article is part of "Build IT," a series about digital-tech trends disrupting industries.

In December, Michael Cohen, the lawyer who gained notoriety working for Donald Trump, asked a federal judge to overlook his latest transgression: citing cases fabricated by generative AI. Cohen had used Google Bard, a predecessor of Google Gemini, to cite cases that didn't exist. Cohen claimed ignorance, saying he misunderstood the chatbot "to be a supercharged search engine."