Automating justice – why the courtroom might provide the ultimate stress test for AI

The way that some AI works makes it unsuitable for some applications in legal work, according to one lawyer who's “at the courtroom coalface”, as he put it.

Alan Parfery is Advocate Depute in the Crown Council, a group of independent senior lawyers from Scotland's Crown Office, who prosecute the most serious criminal cases in the High Courts. But Parfery is no Luddite: he is also a Member of the Probable Futures Project, a UK-wide responsible AI project, which seeks to track the impact of AI on the criminal justice system:

AI seems to me to be truly the transformational technology of our time, something that may go on even to dwarf the internet in terms of its disruption and impact. But my current view is there remains a significant gap between how lawyers are using AI out of court, and how it is being used inside the ...