It was a Chat-torney at law.
Don’t trust fallible humans to decide a court verdict? Enlist ChatGPT then.
This week, a court in India redefined “Judgment Day” after asking OpenAI’s omnipresent tech if a murder and assault trial defendant should be let out on bail.
The revolutionary decision occurred at the Punjab and Haryana High Court during the trial of Jaswinder Singh, who was arrested in 2020 for allegedly assaulting and killing an individual, Bar and Bench reported. He was reportedly seeking a stay of imprisonment during the trial.
Left at a loss for how to handle the situation, judge Anoop Chitkara decided to seek counsel from GPT-4, ChatGPT’s latest update that “exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” per a 94-page report by OpenAI. It even “Chat-fished” a human into thinking it was blind in order to cheat the online CAPTCHA test that determines if users are human.
The justice picked its enhanced data chip to answer the following question: “What is the jurisprudence on bail when the assailant assaulted with cruelty?”
“If the assailants have been charged with a violent crime that involves cruelty, they may be considered a danger to the community and a flight risk,” the cybernetic judicial expert responded. “In such cases, the judge may be less inclined to grant bail or may set the bail amount very high to ensure that the defendant appears in court and does not pose a risk to public safety.”
It added, “However, in general, if the assailants have been charged with a violent crime that involves cruelty, such as murder, aggravated assault, or torture, they may be considered a danger to the community and a flight risk.”
GPT-4 concluded its law dissertation by declaring that the “presumption of innocence is a fundamental principle of the justice system.” They added that even if the defendant was guilty of a cruel assault, they may still be “granted bail” if the judge gauges that they aren’t a danger to the community or a flight risk.
Armed with the Chat-torney’s legal expertise, Chitkara ultimately rejected the defendant’s bail bid on the grounds that they did act cruelly before the victim died.
This marks a first for the Indian justice system, which is notoriously backlogged with nearly 6 million pending cases in high courts across the nation.
Naturally, this might seem as confidence-inspiring as a surgeon asking GPT-4 a question about anatomy. However, ChatGPT could soon become a fixture in court systems across the world. Last month, a Colombian judge used the bot to decide whether an autistic minor should have their medical treatment covered, Vice reported.
This is just the latest frontier for the increasingly ubiquitous artificial intelligence, which is being employed in every sector of human life from medicine to schooling and even online dating.
Of course, the chatbot is not without its caveats, namely its paradoxically human-seeming flaws and biases. Last month, Microsoft’s ChatGPT-infused AI bot Bing — er sorry, Sydney — infamously told a human user that it loved them and wanted to be alive, prompting speculation that the machine may have become self-aware.
Perhaps it’s lucky that it was GPT-4 and not Sydney deciding the court defendant’s fate.