Reply to post: Do not think so

Shall we have AI judging UK court cases? Top beak ponders the future

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Do not think so

There are existing trials in several other countries for software assistants to prepare the drafts for the court decisions and opinions. Several Eu countries(*) and Russia are all testing systems, some of them are at least few years old. These are the ones I know of, I would not be surprised if similar initiatives exist in the Far East.

The common denominator there is that they all practice Napoleonic law so you can have the laws expressed in a easily digestible form for an algorithm to chew on. In fact, the process can be mostly algorithmic with AI handling only the corner cases.

British law is the mother of all tests for AI. It is precedent based and some precedents are dating back to the 16th century. It starts as the mother of all problems in language processing - it is not just English (much more difficult to work with compared to languages with hard grammars), it is English dating back 5 centuries. Then there is the legal aspect of it. Then there is the "sanity" check. Expecting AI to do well where humans with 40 years of qualifications is overly optimistic.

As good example is this year in Parliament. With the government comfortably sleeping on whatever legal opinion it was provided that it does not need to release anything the Parliament pulled out a 17th century law to force it to spill the beans. I do not see an AI being capable of doing that.

(*)I personally know some of the people who write the software for them, they also do work for the UK Parliament by the way

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