Judges are allowed to use ChatGPT to make legal rulings, despite warnings that artificial intelligence (AI) can fabricate cases that never happened.
This is evident from a report in The Daily Telegraph.
The Judicial Office has issued official guidance to thousands of judges in England and Wales, saying AI can be useful for summarizing large amounts of text or in administrative tasks.
However, it was said that chatbots are a “poor way of doing research” and tend to make up fictional cases or legal texts.
The guidelines also warned that the rise of bots such as ChatGPT could eventually be widely used by the public in filing lawsuits and that deepfake technology could be used to create fake evidence.
Sir Geoffrey Vos, the Master of the Rolls, said AI “offers significant opportunities in developing a better, faster and more cost-effective digital justice system”.
He said: “Technology will only advance and the judiciary needs to understand what is going on. Judges, like everyone else, must be acutely aware that AI can provide both inaccurate and accurate answers.”
Earlier this year, a senior judge, Lord Justice Birss, described ChatGPT as “very useful”, saying he had used the chatbot to summarize an area of law he was familiar with, and copied it into a court decision and stuck.
He said Monday that he used ChatGPT as a test and that it was used within guidelines because he had not entered any secret or confidential information into it.
Sir Geoffrey said lawyers may be subject to perjury and criminal penalties if chatbot submissions provide false evidence. “Nothing will change just because they may have gotten what they said incorrectly from an AI chatbot rather than from their own heads,” he said.
Suid Adeyanju, CEO of cyber company RiverSafe said: “The rise of AI use in legal rulings brings great opportunities, but also opens the door to major cyber risks. Hackers have already proven adept at infiltrating and exploiting security holes to steal data, and in this scenario this could also lead to widespread evidence tampering. It is essential that organizations using this technology proceed with caution and ensure they have the necessary security systems in place to keep cybercriminals out.”
Josh Boer, director at technology consultancy VeUP said: “This is the latest example of AI reshaping critical functions and saving time and money by managing administrative tasks. The technology has huge potential to boost the next generation of UK SMEs and provide crucial back-office support. Yet far too many companies lack the skills and support to embrace this. That’s why it’s critical that organizations get to grips with the latest generative AI capabilities, by embracing AWS and other key platforms, to drive cloud growth for the long term.”
#Judges #approve #ChatGPT #legal #rulings
