GLException: No default device available in Android Studio

Question

Before getting the error in the title, I was getting the following transformException

Duplicate files copied in APK META-INF/LICENSE
path\to\file\miglayout-3.7.4.jar
path\to\file\log4j-1.2.16.jar

I cannot delete either, because they are redownloaded by my maven dependencies when I build the gradle. I remediated the problem by adding

packagingOptions{
    pickFirst 'META-INF/*'
}

within the android section of my build.gradle

The error was thrown by the following block of code

    if(null==defaultDevice) { // avoid NPE and notify of incomplete initialization
        throw new GLException("No default device available");
    }

How can I work my way around this problem?