Does artificial intelligence have its place in a courthouse? A Colombian court rendered its judgment partially using answers generated by ChatGPT. This is the first time that the AI tool has intervened in this way, reports Vice.
“Complete the arguments of the adopted decision”
Juan Manuel Padilla García, judge in Cartagena (Colombia), says he asked ChatGPT about legal issues, in particular the case law related to a case. The case involved a dispute with a health insurance company and said judge had to decide whether an autistic child could be covered for medical treatment.
The magistrate would have asked two questions to the chatbot: “Is an autistic minor exempt from paying fees for his therapies?” “Has the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court rendered favorable decisions in similar cases?”
In his decision, Juan Manuel Padilla García claims to have included ChatGPT response elements for “complete the arguments”. Arguments generated by the AI that now appear in the expected.
“The purpose of including these AI-produced texts is in no way to supersede the judge’s decision. What we are really looking for is to optimize the time spent writing judgments after having corroborated the information provided by the AI”assures the magistrate.
Ethical limits
Although no Colombian law appears to prohibit the use of artificial intelligence in legal proceedings, this first case raises ethical questions. Can a dematerialized body help to rule? A magistrate’s use of ChatGPT as an aid to reflection can be challenging, and the inclusion of machine-generated responses in the file could be even more questionable.
In December 2022, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, clarified that ChatGPT can unwittingly “to create a deceptive impression of grandeur” and sometimes making false claims. “It’s a mistake to rely on it for anything important right now”he assured.