Slowly but surely, text generated by AI large language models (LLMs) are weaving their way into our everyday lives, now including legal rulings. New guidance released this week by the UK’s Judicial Office provides judges with some additional clarity on when exactly it’s acceptable or unacceptable to rely on these tools. The UK guidance advises judges against using the tools for generating new analyses. However, it allows summarizing texts. Meanwhile, an increasing number of lawyers and defendants in the US find themselves fined and sanctioned for sloppily introducing AI into their legal practices.
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The Judicial Office’s AI guidance is a set of suggestions and recommendations intended to help judges and their clerks understand AI and its limits as the tech becomes more commonplace. These guidelines aren’t punishable rules of law but rather a “first step” in a series of efforts from the Judicial Office to clarify how judges can interact with the technology.
In general, the new guidance says judges may find AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT useful as a research tool summarizing large bodies of text or for administrative tasks like helping draft emails or memoranda. Simultaneously, it warned judges against using tools to conduct legal research that relies on new information that can’t be independently verified. As for forming legal arguments, the guidance warns public AI chatbots simply “do not produce convincing analyses or reasoning.” Judges may find some benefits in using an AI chatbot to dig up material they already know to be accurate the guidance notes, but they should refrain from using the tools to conduct new research into topics they can’t verify themselves. It appears the guidance puts the responsibility on the user to tell fact from fiction in the LLMs outputs.
“They [AI tools] may be best seen as a way of obtaining…
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