[cm2187]

I am not sure how it works in Colombia but in many countries, court judgements are lengthy documents that summarise all the aspects of a case before detailing the rationale for the decision. It feels awfully inefficient. Any tool that can help this process sounds like a good idea to me. It's no different to ChatGPT generating some dumb boiler plate code that you can adapt, correct and fine tune instead of having to write it from scratch.

[donmcronald]

I think it's pretty scary. The judge is asking it to make judgment calls.

> “Has the jurisprudence of the constitutional court made favorable decisions in similar cases?”

Whether or not similar rulings are "favorable" could contain a lot of nuance.

> It feels awfully inefficient.

Good? I think it's important for a judge to have a comprehensive understanding of the current case and all relevant precedents. If they're going to use ChatGPT to inform their opinion, they might as well let it make the ruling.

Imagine if the judge had another person that's not a lawyer read the relevant info and provide a summary / opinion. People would be appalled.

[fnordpiglet]

If it’s making reviewed boilerplate how is it making a judgement call?

Having human beings write copious tedious boilerplate isn’t good. It takes the judges mind and applies to tedium rather than using judgement. Further under tedium humans make mistakes.

[donmcronald]

> “Has the jurisprudence of the constitutional court made favorable decisions in similar cases?”

That's a judgment call because "favorable" is subjective. Someone who gets sent to jail for 1 year might tell you the prosecutor got a favorable ruling while the prosecutor considers it unfavorable because they wanted the person sentenced to 5 years.

[fnordpiglet]

Note if you read it carefully he only included the responses but wrote parallel arguments and then synthesized the two. So, like I said, it was reviewed.

It’s like complaining engineers use Monte Carlo simulations, which are random, to do analyses of structural integrity instead of doing all the calculations using a human computer[1]. I see these LLM chatbots as being akin to a computational tool like a calculator. It’s great for crunching and provides a force multiplier for a skilled person using it to augment their own abilities, but it’s (not yet) a replacement for the expert.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

[rebuilder]

It’s not really clear to me from reading the article what it did here, but it sounds like the judge asked the bot if there is precedent. If that’s the case, what if the issue is nuanced and the precedents are conflicting - the bot might provide favourable rulings which check out under review, but omit unfavourable ones.

[fnordpiglet]

The judge wrote a parallel analysis and included the chatgpt answer, an analysis comparing them, and a final analysis incorporating both his reasoning and the chatgpt reasoning.

[luckylion]

And you now need to spend a lot of time on correcting. You need to super-carefully read every sentence, because they all sound correct, but may be factually wrong. Are you really saving time at that point?

You don't need to do that for SEO-copy, but for court judgements? I feel like that's one of those things where you don't want to take shortcuts to save and hour or three.

[dogma1138]

That’s what clerks are for, judges rarely write their full judgements they’ll have a team of clerks which will do it based on the instructions from the judge.