With help from Derek Robertson
You know the fears about AI automation are real when even the chief justice of the United States starts to sound nervous.
John Roberts’ year-end report on the federal judiciary has caused a stir with its defense of the value of human judges in a world where AI models have started passing bar exams.
While encouraging members of the stodgy legal profession to sit up and pay attention to AI’s advances, Roberts made the case that the job of judging involves an irreducible human element. “Legal determinations often involve gray areas that still require application of human judgment,” he argued.
Even if human judges aren’t going anywhere soon, the evidence suggests Roberts is right to be raising the alarm on AI. The technology is poised, or in some cases already starting, to collide with the practice of law in several arenas, many of which might not be obvious – but could have long-term effects.
One particularly thorny issue will be the admission of evidence that is an output of an AI model, according to James Baker, a former federal appeals judge and the co-author of a 2023 judges’ guide to AI published by the Federal Judicial Center, a research agency run by and for the judiciary.
The report anticipates that outputs like AI-generated analyses of medical tests or AI-screened job applicant pools will soon start posing legal dilemmas for judges.
Baker told DFD that he expects the complexity of models to make controversies over AI evidence more vexing than debates over DNA evidence, which overcame initial skepticism to become a mainstay in American legal proceedings.
“The challenge with AI is every AI model is different,” he said, “What’s more, AI
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