A judge in Colombia has sparked alarm in the legal world by revealing that he used Artificial Intelligence site ChatGPT to help him decide a case involving an autistic child.
Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia, who presides over a tribunal in the Caribbean city of Cartagena, announced that he had used the system in his January 30 ruling.
He was asked it to rule whether a health insurance company could deny paying fees for medical appointments, therapy and transportation for an autistic boy named Salvador, given his parents’ limited income.
Padilla – who ruled in favor of the boy, and against the health insurance, said he asked the bot: ‘Is autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?’ among other questions.
It answered: ‘Yes, this is correct. According to the regulations in Colombia, minors diagnosed with autism are exempt from paying fees for their therapies.’
Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia, a judge in Cartagena, said on January 30 he used ChatGPT to research his decision in a case involving an autistic child
Padilla presides over this court in Cartagena – the Primero Laboral, or employment tribunal
The judge argued that ChatGPT performs services previously provided by a secretary and did so ‘in an organized, simple and structured manner’ which could ‘improve response times’ in the justice system.
Padilla told Blu Radio that the program helped judges, and was not a threat to the legal system.
He said ChatGPT and other such programs could be useful to ‘facilitate the drafting of texts’.
But, he said, the system was ‘not with the aim of replacing’ judges.
Padilla insisted that ‘by asking questions to the application we do not stop being judges, thinking beings.’
Padilla said he believes other judges will use ChatGPT for research, as he did
ChatGPT is being used by millions of people worldwide to generate written answers
ChatGPT uses artificial intelligence and reams of data from the internet to generate answers to questions posed by human users.
Professor Juan David Gutierrez of Rosario University was among those to express incredulity at the judge’s admission.
Gutierrez, an expert in artificial intelligence regulation and governance, said he put the same questions to ChatGPT, and got different responses.
‘It is certainly not responsible or ethical to use ChatGPT as intended by the judge in the ruling in question,’ he wrote on Twitter.
He called for urgent ‘digital literacy’ training for judges.
Created by California-based company OpenAI, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm since its launch in November, with its ability to write essays, articles, poems and computer code in just seconds.
Critics have raised fears it could be used for widespread cheating in schools and universities.
OpenAI has cautioned that its tool can make mistakes.
But Padilla said he believes other judges will follow suit.
‘I suspect that many of my colleagues are going to join in this and begin to construct their rulings ethically with the help of artificial intelligence,’ he said.
The system has such promising capabilities that Microsoft recently announced a new ‘multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment’ to grow the tech.
The firm’s backing of the artificial intelligence bot comes as it lays off 10,000 employees and experts warn AI is making well-paid workers increasingly vulnerable.
Microsoft announced a ‘multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment’ in ChatGPT as it moves to sack nearly five percent of its global workforce this month as ‘tech wreck’ sweeps Silicon Valley. Pictured: CEO Satya Nadella
‘AI is replacing the white-collar workers’, said Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.
‘I don’t think anyone can stop that. This is not crying wolf,’ Shi told The New York Post. ‘The wolf is at the door.’
Since it was released for free to the public in November by company OpenAI, the chatbot caused a stir online and amassed close to a million users in its first week.
The system is trained on a huge data set and is designed to continually improve itself, allowing it to generate answers to nearly any question.
Through a simple text prompt, the tech has the ability to work through almost any problem it is faced with, with varying accuracy depending on its task.
The tool passed several law school exams when University of Minnesota professors put it to the test, where it averaged a passing C+ grade on the student papers.
In the law exam essay questions, the bot was able to accurately recite legal rules and correctly describe cases.
ChatGPT also recently scored higher than many humans on an MBA exam at Penn’s elite Wharton School, where it received a respectable B- grade.
The professor who administered the test said the chatbot was able to do ‘professional tasks’ such as ‘writing software code and preparing legal documents.’
The tool’s capabilities have led experts to warn the continually improving system could spell doom for numerous industries.
Among the job fields that could soon become dominated by the artificial intelligence includes finance, graphic design and education.
One industry that is in particular danger is tech and software design, a field that has already been rocked in recent times as Silicon Valley has undergone massive staff layoffs.
Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, warned that the AI could cost white collar jobs
The ChatGPT system is trained on a huge data set and is designed to continually improve itself, allowing it to generate answers to nearly any question
Microsoft sacked nearly five percent of its workforce as 10,000 employees were left out of work this month at the same time the firm committed billions into the future of ChatGPT.
‘We are announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world,’ the company said in a statement.
The new wave of funding comes after Microsoft already plowed a billion dollars into Open AI in 2019.
Gil Luria, a technology strategist at finance firm D.A. Davidson, said the move showed the company was banking on AI to drive growth.
‘It tells you a lot that within a week of announcing pretty substantial layoffs, Microsoft is also announcing a substantial investment in OpenAI,’ Luria told Yahoo Finance.
‘It tells you that that’s where they think a lot of the future growth for Microsoft can come from, and that the technology that OpenAI is developing can drive meaningful improvements to a broad set of products for them.’
Read the full article here