AI in the courtroom

In these coming months, I will be thinking about AI in the courtroom as preparation for panel discussions and workshops: AI and its uses, regulations, implications for judicial reasoning, as a challenge for courts and judiciaries and their role in society. I will share those thoughts in this and upcoming blogs.

 

AI in the courtroom: a world-wide experiment

We are all part of a worldwide experiment. An experiment is a procedure carried out to determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried, to provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. For the world-wide AI and justice experiment, we all provide materials, input, for the experiment to test the effects of the output of artificial intelligence. Most of the input is probably case law published online. The output is AI results, the factor to be manipulated is the workings of the AI.

Lawyers’ and case parties’ case information needs to be correct, and it also needs to be explainable, that is, based on solid reasoning and recognized sources. When the discourse found AI did not explain  what its sources were, the output factor was manipulated, and the references were included. So now, we can at least see where the information comes from. But that has not solved the problem. AI’s sources are not always real; AI fabulates sources, apparently because it is trained to please the users. The sources may be non-existent, they may exist but be irrelevant to the case, and they may argue something completely different. Courts and lawyers found this out when they checked the sources in claim documents. Court staff now need to check each reference, which creates a lot of extra work.

Judges using AI for their judgments also need to conform to some rules. One is fair procedure: parties must have equal opportunities to put their own case forward and test the other party’s case. This is standard case law now. Judges must also be transparent in their use of AI: in general search results, in testing evidence parties must have a chance to test the results. For judges finding general search results on the internet, judges searching for information. factual data not in the case file, but found on the internet of its own accord the case law is clear. The information needs to be disclosed and parties need to be given the opportunity to present arguments on the matter. Judges also need to be transparent about AI in composing their judgments. By now, there is an abundance of guidance on the use of AI. I will discuss that in another blog.