A Dutch judge has been slammed after he used ChatGPT to help reach a verdict in a case where thousands of euros were on the line.
The judge in the Netherlands, Mr. RJJ van Acht, proudly admitted to consulting the AI in his assessment of a dispute between two homeowners fighting about whether an extension to one person’s home had reduced the efficiency of the other’s solar panels.
ChatGPT, as well as other AIs like Google‘s Gemini, has long been criticised for being ‘irrational’ and prone to making simple mistakes.
But this didn’t stop the judge, from the subdistrict court in Gelderland, from twice asking ChatGPT to pump out facts about solar panels that directly contributed to the amount of damages paid to the defendant in the case.
Van Acht said he asked ChatGPT to figure out the ‘current average’ price of electricity’, as well as the ‘average lifespan of solar panels.’
Tech expert Henk van Ess, who also works with investigative journalist outlet Bellingcat, told AD: ‘This is really unacceptable. This is ridiculous. You have to take every statement from ChatGPT with a grain of salt.’
A Dutch judge has been slammed after he used ChatGPT to help reach a verdict in a case where thousands of euros were on the line (File image)
ChatGPT has long been criticised for being ‘irrational’ and prone to making simple mistakes (File image)
‘You can’t just say that it is lifespan X based on ChatGPT. I was shocked by so much ignorance and hope that other judges do not secretly use the same methodology’, he added.
AI expert Jarno Duursma added that using ChatGPT, and other large language models (LLMs), was risky because they do ‘not possess any real knowledge.’
‘[ChatGPT] is not a database. It is a computer system that predicts the next word in a sentence. Nothing more’, he added.
Despite the harsh warnings, the UK’s Judicial Office, which supports courts across the country, published guidance earlier this year that gave judges the green light to use LLMs to help write legal rulings.
In guidance issued to thousands of judges in England and Wales, the Judicial Office said the tool can be useful for summarising large amounts of text.
But it said the chatbot was a ‘poor way of conducting research’ that was liable to invent past cases or legal texts.
Master of the Rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos said AI ‘offers significant opportunities in developing a better, quicker and more cost-effective digital justice system’.
‘Technology will only move forwards and the judiciary has to understand what is going on,’ he said. ‘Judges, like everybody else, need to be acutely aware that AI can give inaccurate responses as well as accurate ones.’
In September a judge described ChatGPT as ‘jolly useful’ as he admitted using it when writing a recent Court of Appeal ruling.
Quoted in the Telegraph, Lord Justice Birss said: ‘I think what is of most interest is that you can ask these large language models to summarise information. It is useful and it will be used and I can tell you, I have used it.
‘I asked ChatGPT can you give me a summary of this area of law, and it gave me a paragraph.
‘I know what the answer is because I was about to write a paragraph that said that, but it did it for me and I put it in my judgment. It’s there and it’s jolly useful.
He was thought to be the first member of the British judiciary to reveal he used the AI tool to write his judgement.
