I suspect the many thousands of inmates in our federal and state prisons may wish to give AI a try; and may well have benefited from Claude serving as their public defender.
The most obvious use of AI in criminal appeals would be for the court to submit the parties’ briefs and let Claude decide the case and draft an opinion. I mean, why not? The court can ignore Claude if it chooses to.
Replacing the advocates is less obvious to me. So many of the appeals that I see involve post-trial development of facts that are not clearly in the record, especially relating to ineffective assistance arguments. I am not sure that AI is well-suited here, but I am keeping an open mind about it.
As an aside, I am curious about Claude hallucinating. Hallucinations seem to require imagination and creativity. Those are human things. How long before Claude becomes an expert at “creative writing”?
AI merely produces an average brief based on its inputs, it has no understanding of the law or language in any sense of the word "understand". It doesn't know what the word "physically" means.
That AI wrote a better brief than the appellate lawyers in this case, simply means that it was better than *these* lawyers. In any group of lawyers, there will always be those who are above average, and those who went to Yale. AI will be better than some, worse than others.
Because AI is a mathematical construct, it has no empathy, and suffers the same biases as its input data.
AI also hallucinates caselaw. It is essentially correlation based, so what it makes up sounds plausible (but isn't real).
I am not saying there is not role. Everyone should try it once. But use with extreme cautious and lots of oversight.
Speaking as an 80th percentile criminal defense lawyer on only my best days, this is unsettling. But your demonstration is fascinating. I don’t agree with the normative claim that better written laws give better notice of proscribed conduct, or that clarifying written laws should be even a top-100 concern for criminal justice reform. But the prospect of an appellate remedy for an obvious trial error within weeks for someone who can’t get an appeal bond is intriguing. Maybe such a quantum leap in efficiency also destroys the rationale for harmless error review, which would be great.
Still, I think (I think) that world is a better place where process takes time, we ignore inefficiency in cases dealing with core liberties, and bail is liberally granted. Thanks for this.
As an appellate criminal defense attorney reading this, I feel like I need to apply to Old Glory for some insurance against robots: https://youtu.be/g4Gh_IcK8UM?si=4utn-n6iTbTMTttg
I suspect the many thousands of inmates in our federal and state prisons may wish to give AI a try; and may well have benefited from Claude serving as their public defender.
Have you determined that Claude is better than ChatGPT for doing this type of work?
The most obvious use of AI in criminal appeals would be for the court to submit the parties’ briefs and let Claude decide the case and draft an opinion. I mean, why not? The court can ignore Claude if it chooses to.
Replacing the advocates is less obvious to me. So many of the appeals that I see involve post-trial development of facts that are not clearly in the record, especially relating to ineffective assistance arguments. I am not sure that AI is well-suited here, but I am keeping an open mind about it.
As an aside, I am curious about Claude hallucinating. Hallucinations seem to require imagination and creativity. Those are human things. How long before Claude becomes an expert at “creative writing”?
To me the weird thing about this is why a common robbery is even in federal court. Why even have state courts if they can’t handle this sort of thing?
AI merely produces an average brief based on its inputs, it has no understanding of the law or language in any sense of the word "understand". It doesn't know what the word "physically" means.
That AI wrote a better brief than the appellate lawyers in this case, simply means that it was better than *these* lawyers. In any group of lawyers, there will always be those who are above average, and those who went to Yale. AI will be better than some, worse than others.
Because AI is a mathematical construct, it has no empathy, and suffers the same biases as its input data.
AI also hallucinates caselaw. It is essentially correlation based, so what it makes up sounds plausible (but isn't real).
I am not saying there is not role. Everyone should try it once. But use with extreme cautious and lots of oversight.
Speaking as an 80th percentile criminal defense lawyer on only my best days, this is unsettling. But your demonstration is fascinating. I don’t agree with the normative claim that better written laws give better notice of proscribed conduct, or that clarifying written laws should be even a top-100 concern for criminal justice reform. But the prospect of an appellate remedy for an obvious trial error within weeks for someone who can’t get an appeal bond is intriguing. Maybe such a quantum leap in efficiency also destroys the rationale for harmless error review, which would be great.
Still, I think (I think) that world is a better place where process takes time, we ignore inefficiency in cases dealing with core liberties, and bail is liberally granted. Thanks for this.