UK Judges Can Now Use ChatGPT To Write Rulings Despite Concerns That The Chatbot Can Cite Fake Cases

Judges in England and Wales can now use OpenAI's ChatGPT to write rulings, making it one of the first few countries to allow AI in judicial procedures.

What Happened: The UK Judicial Office issued a guidance announcing its decision to embrace AI, explaining how it can be useful in writing judgments and more.

The six-page document released by the UK Judicial Office explains all the potential security and legal issues that judges might experience while using AI. This includes upholding confidentiality and privacy, accuracy, and preventing bias from creeping in, among other issues.

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While AI has proved to be useful in things like automating tasks, data analysis, running large numbers of tasks, checking permutations and combinations, and even in medical diagnosis, it has not yet proven to be as useful in the legal sector.

One of the things that AI can do is summarize large bodies of text – while this works well for simpler topics, it's not clear yet if AI can work well with legalese.

AI chatbots also fare relatively poorly regarding reasoning and comparisons, so that's another aspect that this judicial guidance tells judges to avoid.

However, simpler tasks like composing mails and asking for presentation suggestions can be done.

Why It Matters: Although AI has touched upon many aspects of businesses and governance, the judiciary has remained relatively isolated from it so far.

There's a good reason for this, too. In the past, two lawyers were fined $5,000 by a court for citing fictitious cases in their arguments.

It wasn't their mistake, per se. The Microsoft Corp.-backed MSFT OpenAI's ChatGPT took the creative freedom to draw up cases that never existed in the first place.

Generative AI chatbots have been known to hallucinate – essentially fabricating information out of thin air. While it does not always happen, the sensitive nature of the law means the judiciary cannot afford to make mistakes such as these.

Image Credits – Shutterstock

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