CJ warns against AI overuse in legal profession

Shane Su­perville

Chief Jus­tice Ron­nie Boodoos­ingh has ac­knowl­edged the ben­e­fits of Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence (AI) pro­grammes in com­pil­ing and analysing da­ta but warned that they should not re­place hu­man rea­son­ing and le­gal ex­pe­ri­ence.

Boodoos­ingh made the re­marks dur­ing his fea­ture ad­dress at the open­ing of the Law As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go's (LATT) Bi­en­ni­al Law Con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency Con­fer­ence Cen­tre to­day.

He ac­knowl­edged that AI soft­ware was con­ve­nient, jok­ing that he en­tered his com­plet­ed speech in­to one such pro­gramme and re­ceived a 90 per cent rat­ing.

How­ev­er, Boodoos­ingh cau­tioned against ju­di­cial of­fi­cers be­com­ing over­ly re­liant on the tools, say­ing key de­ci­sion-mak­ing should re­main firm­ly in hu­man hands. He ar­gued that ad­ju­di­cat­ing mat­ters re­quired em­pa­thy that could not come from a ma­chine.

"We do not wish AI to be de­cid­ing cas­es for us, any more than we should wish AI to de­cide what laws Par­lia­ment should en­act or de­cid­ing how pub­lic funds should be spent.

"It can pro­vide use­ful da­ta for us to make the hu­man de­ci­sions.

"It is bet­ter that we wait a bit longer for a hu­man de­ci­sion to be made rather than re­ceiv­ing swifter jus­tice by a ma­chine de­cid­ing by pre­dict­ing the next words based on syn­the­sis­ing pre­vi­ous words."

Boodoos­ingh said he was not op­posed to the use of the soft­ware but stressed the im­por­tance of de­ter­min­ing how AI could be used re­spon­si­bly with­in the le­gal pro­fes­sion.