British Judge Uses ChatGPT to Write Ruling, Hails AI's Vast Potential

A prominent UK court of appeal judge made history by using ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, to summarize a legal topic.

Lord Justice Birss, an expert in intellectual property law, called the AI-driven chatbot "jolly useful" after it gave him a good summary of a particular legal area.

The British judge acknowledged the enormous potential of generative big language models in remarks he made at a symposium the Law Society organized.

"I think what is of most interest is that you can ask these large language models to summarize information. It is useful and it will be used and I can tell you, I have used it," he expressed, as reported by The Guardian.

Taking Full Responsibility

Lord Justice Birss made it clear that ChatGPT only helped him with work he was going to complete and that he independently checked and approved the findings, stressing that he bears full personal responsibility for the substance of his decisions.

"I am not trying to give the responsibility to somebody else. All it did was a task which I was about to do and which I knew the answer and could recognize as being acceptable," he said.

This is the first time a British judge has used ChatGPT to support a ruling in a court case. Judges using ChatGPT are not subject to any official instructions from the Judicial Office.

A Colombian judge made news earlier this year when they asked ChatGPT for help in assessing whether a handicapped child's medical insurance should pay for associated therapy, per The Telegraph. The use of AI in this setting sparked a worldwide discussion on the incorporation of AI into judicial systems.

ChatGPT's Integrity Questioned

Two lawyers in New York were fined for using ChatGPT to help with a legal problem. While processing personal injury litigation against the airline Avianca on behalf of a client, they provided a legal document with forged case references.

Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca from the Manhattan legal firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman were accused of making false and misleading statements to the court by District Judge Peter Kevin Castel. Even though the court acknowledged that using trustworthy AI technologies for help was not necessarily "inappropriate," he chastised the attorneys and their company for failing to fulfill their duties.

They had filed bogus legal opinions, replete with ChatGPT's artificial intelligence-generated quotations and citations. Furthermore, even when legal orders cast doubt on the validity of these bogus opinions, they continued to support them.

While ChatGPT and other AI technologies have many benefits, there are also possible drawbacks. According to Cryptopolitan, the problem of AI hallucination, when the AI provides information that may be factually erroneous or deceptive, is one of the major worries. Due to worries about client confidentiality and the creation of inaccurate legal material, law firms have sometimes avoided using ChatGPT.

In contrast, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, helped Magic Circle business Allen & Overy create its AI chatbot, Harvey. With human attorneys assessing the output to assure correctness and dependability, Harvey intends to automate operations like contract preparation.