Judges allowed to use ChatGPT to write legal rulings

Judges in England and Wales will be allowed to use ChatGPT to help write legal rulings, despite concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) could invent bogus cases.

New official guidance issued to thousands of judges by the Judicial Office states that AI can be useful for summarising large amounts of text or in administrative tasks. It does, however, warn that AI chatbots must not be used to conduct legal research or undertake legal analysis, as they are prone to making up fictitious cases or legal texts. Judges were also advised not to put private information into a chatbot as it could end up in the public domain.

The Telegraph reported that chatbots have "landed lawyers in the US into difficulties after they used ChatGPT to write a court filing that contained multiple fictional cases invented by the bot".

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Judges, "like everybody else, need to be acutely aware that AI can give inaccurate responses as well as accurate ones" said Sir Geoffrey Vos, the Master of the Rolls. But he also said that AI "offers significant opportunities in developing a better, quicker and more cost-effective digital justice system".

Vos told Reuters in March that AI "certainly does not pose any threat" to the legal profession and even predicted the technology could eventually be used to resolve low-level disputes, though the prospect was still "miles away", he said.

In September, Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Birss admitted using ChatGPT to summarise an area of law which he then used in his ruling. "I'm taking full personal responsibility for what I put in my judgment." he said. "All it did was a task which I was about to do and which I knew the answer and could recognise as being acceptable."

It was the "first known use of ChatGPT by a British judge to write part of a judgment", The Guardian reported.