Artificial intelligence enters trials and robot judges arrive. It does not happen in Italy, where AI has been blocked for now, but in Peru, where ChatGpt has helped write a sentence. In particular, artificial intelligence intervened in a divorce case, in which the judge had to determine the maintenance allowance that a father had to pay for his daughter. In this case, the AI has quantified the sum in detail. A calculation that, in reality, could have been done even with a simple calculator, but for the first time an unexplored path is taken and the field of justice opens up to a machine, which decides what must be done. A small revolution.
AI was based on an algorithm that eventually calculated a percentage of 20 percent of the income owed by the father to his wife to support his daughter. In Italy such a thing cannot happen, at least for the moment: ChatGpt cannot be used, much less in a courtroom. No Ai, especially for privacy issues and also for the protection of personal data. But the questions, for the use of machine intelligence in justice, are many. And not only ethical, linked to the fact that it is not easy to entrust decisions concerning living beings to a machine. How can the role of defense not be frustrated, for example, if decisions are entrusted to artificial intelligence. Furthermore, who should be held responsible for what has been decided. How can one appeal, if the sentence was issued by a machine, which technically perhaps cannot even be wrong.
However, there are also advantages to relying on machines. Some searches could be speeded up clearly, even in the legal field. With a standardized decision-making process, the work of the courts could be speeded up. Without taking into account the fact that the use of artificial intelligence would limit to a minimum, or perhaps be able to completely exclude the discretion of the judges, which is sometimes questioned.
The world hypothesized by the writer Philip Dick and staged in the film “Minority report” is still far away, in which machines analyze human behavior and in fact block people (and have them arrested) a moment before they commit the crimes of which they will then be accused. But it’s not just science fiction anymore: ever more elaborate computers, and with them artificial intelligence, have come into life. It’s up to the man to establish to what extent they will be able to condition it.
«Despite what one might believe, all this should cause very little sensation – explains the lawyer Edoardo Amati, senior associate Tonucci & Partners – For some time now, information technology has made its way into the administration of justice (as indeed in every sector of our society). Suffice it to say that the doctrine has coined the expression “cybernetics of law” to indicate the eventuality (no longer so remote) that the “computer” is programmed for the automatic application of the law (and therefore for the formation of administrative measures or jurisdictional) or for the stipulation of contracts without human intervention. After all, it would be stupid (in the opinion of the writer) to a priori oppose the change taking place without understanding the opportunities». And again: «Certainly we are not yet (fortunately) at a complete level of what is called “predictive justice” (that is, the ability of machines to convert the applicable law into natural language to deal with a judicial case and anticipate the probability that verify a particular decision) but it is clear that the direction taken is that of an ever greater involvement of “machines” to arrive (at least in some sectors) at a service delivery approach defined as “machine-to-machine” (i.e. services provided through direct interaction between “objects”, without the need for human intervention). Therefore, no alarmism and indeed an ever greater and intelligent interaction between human abilities and artificial ingenuity is therefore welcome without however losing sight of the fact that, at least in the judicial field, the use of IT systems (also through chatbots) will have to remain “only “an instrument of assistance, but it cannot replace the role of either the defenders or the judge, understood as persons, and as such pillars of a legal and procedural system conceived by man for man”.