Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. dedicated your annual end of year report on the State of the Federal Judiciary, released Sunday, about the positive role artificial intelligence can play in the legal system and the threats it poses.
His report did not address the Supreme Court's difficult year, including its adoption of an ethics code that many said was ineffective. He also did not address the impending cases arising from former President Donald J. Trump's criminal proceedings or questions about his eligibility to hold office.
The chief justice's report was timely, however, coming days after revelations that Michael D. Cohen, Trump's former intermediary, had provided his lawyer with fake legal subpoenas created by Google Bard, a program of artificial intelligence.
Referring to a previous similar episode, Chief Justice Roberts said that “any use of ai requires caution and humility.”
“One of the prominent applications of ai made headlines this year for a deficiency known as 'hallucination,'” he wrote, “which caused attorneys using the application to file briefs with subpoenas for nonexistent cases. (Always a bad idea).”
Chief Justice Roberts acknowledged the promise of the new technology, even as he noted its dangers.
“Law professors report with amazement and distress that ai can apparently earn B grades on law school assignments and even pass the bar exam,” he wrote. “Legal research will soon be unimaginable without it. Obviously, ai has great potential to dramatically increase access to key information for both lawyers and non-lawyers. But it is equally obvious that it risks invading privacy interests and dehumanizing the law.”
The chief justice, mentioning bankruptcy forms, said some applications could speed up legal filings and save money. “These tools have the welcome potential to smooth out any mismatch between available resources and urgent needs in our justice system,” he wrote.
Chief Justice Roberts has long been interested in the intersection of law and technology. He wrote the majority opinions in decisions that generally require the government to obtain court orders to search digital information on cellphones seized from people who have been arrested and to collect large amounts of location data on cellphone companies' customers.
In his 2017 visit to Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteThe chief justice was asked if he could “envision a day when intelligent machines, powered by artificial intelligence, would assist in fact-finding in court or, even more controversially, in judicial decision-making.” ”.
The Chief Justice said yes. “It's a day that's already here,” he said, “and it's putting significant pressure on the way the judiciary does things.” It appeared to refer to the software used in sentencing decisions.
That tension has only increased, the president of the Supreme Court wrote on Sunday.
“In criminal cases, the use of ai to assess flight risk, recidivism, and other largely discretionary decisions involving predictions has raised concerns about due process, reliability, and potential bias,” he wrote. “At least today, studies show a persistent public perception of a 'human-ai fairness gap,' reflecting the view that human decisions, for all their flaws, are fairer than anything that the machine spits out”.
Chief Justice Roberts concluded that “legal determinations often involve gray areas that still require the application of human judgment.”
“Judges, for example, measure the sincerity of an accused's speech at the time of sentencing,” he wrote. “Nuance matters: a lot can change with a trembling hand, a trembling voice, a change in inflection, a drop of sweat, a moment of hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the correct inferences from these clues.”
Appellate judges also won't be replaced anytime soon, he wrote.
“Many appellate decisions turn on whether a lower court has abused its discretion, a standard that by its nature involves fact-specific gray areas,” the chief justice wrote. “Others focus on open questions about how the law should evolve in new areas. “ai relies heavily on existing information, which can inform but not make such decisions.”