There’s absolutely nothing normal about anything in this situation.
Major Drag Alert
A one-time Fugees rap group member claims that his attorney fumbled his conspiracy trial because he used artificial intelligence.
As The Register reports, founding Fugee Prakazrel “Pras” Michel has accused his former defense attorney David Kenner of using AI in the rapper’s federal conspiracy trial, leading to him being found guilty of a bunch of crimes, including being a foreign agent for China.
To be fair, Michel’s case was super weird even before he made the AI accusation against his ex-attorney. The “Ghetto Superstar” rapper had apparently fashioned himself a politico and businessman after going solo and getting into film and television in the first decade of the 2000s, eventually donating massive sums to Barack Obama’s reelection efforts in 2012 on behalf of foreign entities — a charge that he was found guilty of, but denies is true.
In the Obama reelection scheme, Pras crossed paths with Malaysian financier Jho Low, the “Wolf of Wall Street” film investor who’s still on the run from the law after being hit with massive-scale corruption charges, including some of those for which Michel was found guilty.
And now we have a fascinating AI twist on that decidedly old-school financial drama.
Writer In The Dark
In a heavily redacted motion filed in district court in Washington, DC, Michel claims that Kenner used “an experimental AI program to write his closing argument, which made frivolous arguments, conflated the schemes, and failed to highlight key weaknesses” in the government’s case against him.
As wild as that sounds, the rapper has some evidence of his claim: a May press release from the AI company EyeLevel, which quoted his attorney and announced that he had used the company’s LitAssist research tool in Michel’s case.
“This is an absolute game changer for complex litigation,” Kenner said in the EyeLevel press release. “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 also alleged in his motion that his ex-attorney had an “undisclosed financial stake” in the AI company and that he “experimented with it during Michel’s trial so they could issue a press release afterward promoting the program,” which the motion describes as “a clear conflict of interest.”
He went on to say that Kenner confused some of his ten charges with each other and failed to point out what the rapper considers “the strongest and most obvious argument: that there was no evidence that Michel or anyone else acted at the ‘direction or control’ of the Chinese government.”
There’s a whole lot going on in this update to the Pras trial, which is by no means the first time AI has been used in legal proceedings but does appear to be a novel reason to ask for a new trial — not to mention one more compelling example of why this technology may not be ready for the courtroom.
More on AI and the law: Google Terrified of Lawsuit That Would “Take a Sledgehammer” to Generative AI
