When Judges Meet Generative AI

So this is really fascinating.

I mean, we've heard all of us, I think, various stories of people like lawyers or unrepresented litigants filing things based on artificial intelligence where it's just made up cases and so on.

Right.

So that's there have been numerous reports of that.

There was I think we might have touched on this briefly a few months ago.

There's actually a judge in Quebec.

who issued a judgment which they had generated using artificial intelligence, which itself had hallucinated various authorities, and that was the basis for the judge's decision, rather unsettling.

And that may have prompted this, which just came out, which is to say there was a guidance just issued by each of the various courts in Quebec, like the Court of Appeal there, the Superior Court, the Quebec Court, Visible Court, they came out just this week, I think it is, with these guidance for judges on how they're supposed to use or not use artificial intelligence.

There are a number of things in it, which I think are really pretty fascinating.

And frankly, it also caused me to think back, maybe it dates me a little bit, to a Futurama episode from more than a decade ago, where a couple of the characters would be judged by a Macintosh and the things, you know, going across, judging, judging, and then comes up with a system error.

What do you do about that? But the concerns set out in this guidance for the judges in Quebec are are really in a couple of different categories.

And one of the categories is interesting because the guidance for them starts with various premises.

Like they've determined that, and this is interesting because it's sort of evolving, the premise includes that artificial intelligence systems are not intelligent in the human sense of the word, And then they say that they nearly simulate in appearance certain forms of human reasoning, which is a fascinating starting point.

That may be true.

I guess it's a matter of debate these days, what exactly is going on in there.

The premise of it is that it's not appropriate for judges to be delegating any part of their decision-making function to a generative AI system.

And the direction for judges there, this has a number of other propositions, that AI cannot understand the law or exercise judgment and assumes no responsibility, some of which is clearly true, at least in terms of the responsibility part of it.

But it's a fascinating commentary in terms of sort of, well, what exactly is AI currently? And, you know, what is reasonable to delegate to it? Because the policy doesn't say you just cannot use this.

And in fact, it lists various things that a judge might want to consider using AI for, which is also very interesting.

And so, for example, it suggests that judges might consider using AI for things like they describe it as producing a strictly descriptive summary of testimony or a document or a series of events or certain ancillary tasks related to judicial reasoning.

or they might choose to use it to rephrase things, like linguistic correction or translation of text that a judge has drafted themselves, right? English and French, for example.

So that's really interesting, right? I mean, the quality of translation has really improved over the years, but that's one of the things to be, that a judge, they suggest, might use it for.

Although the other level of concern, and this is, I think, a real level of concern is, Quite apart from those sort of philosophical things about who is to be making these decisions and, you know, is that thing reliable? And, you know, is there any responsibility? Can it exercise judgment or can it, you know, engage in, you know, intelligence? You know, that's an interesting philosophical discussion.

But the other level of concern is one with respect to confidentiality and protection of information that could be private or sensitive.

And so one of the things that this policy directs judges not to do is not to provide an AI tool with things including a draft judgment.