Should AI Decide Your Court Case? This Judge Says Yes

People will find out when they produce fake images to the court that they are committing perjury and they will go to prison, just as if they’d forged a will.

I think we need to be cautious about predicting disaster. I’m very optimistic.

You’ve previously described an “inevitable” future where simpler civil cases are adjudicated entirely by AI. Why are you confident that’s where we’re headed?

You need to find a way to deliver justice that is within the cultural grain. That doesn’t mean you just conduct all your cases on TikTok. But if you don’t understand that people are asking LLMs for the answer to almost every question under the sun, including legal questions, you’re likely to get it wrong when you try to devise a process fit for the 21st century.

It’s all about consensus. It will only be possible to ask people to accept algorithmic decision-making if they consent to the process in a particular case, or if society decides through legislation.

When people go to court and get an adverse outcome, even if they regard the outcome as idiosyncratic or even wrong, when it’s delivered in a human way, it can be accepted over time. With AI, we have to be careful; it may be less easy for people to accept an adverse machine-driven decision.

I very much want to see a very open, international discussion about how we should resolve disputes.

I suspect part of the reason people object to trial by AI is because we can’t know precisely how a model has arrived at a decision. What’s to be done about this problem of explainability?

I don’t think it’s about reasoning; it’s about outcomes. The AI can produce very plausible reasoning. You can’t see how it produced that reasoning, but you can see the reasoning it produced, and you can judge the plausibility.

I don’t think you’ll ever do away with human judges. There’s something almost biblical about the human judge; it’s in the human psyche to want to be judged by their fellow man. But that does not mean that in some situations people wouldn’t rather have a quick outcome—even if it’s not a human outcome.

Where would you draw the line?

I don’t think judges are yet in the position to say. It’s a question for society, politicians, and legislation to resolve. That debate is really important.

I think that custody and family cases are one of the areas where essentially human judgment is expected, even by the younger generation. In complex commercial cases, I think that’s also the case. But I think we will whittle away at how commercial cases are decided by using AI to collate information to make the decision-making process better and easier.

We will allow more people access to justice more cheaply and more quickly using technology. That will be an overall good for the economy and for the people we serve.