Navigating the Intersection of AI and Law: How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping the Face of Justice?

Artificial intelligence, a powerful tool,

now takes its place within the legal system.

It moves through data and algorithms,

helping lawyers predict outcomes and make decisions.

It scans mountains of paperwork and case files,

sorting fact from fiction at a relentless pace.

No human can match its speed and power,

as it races to uncover the truth.

The verses above were written by an AI system. It produced this poem by scanning a vast pool of data drawn from millions of pieces of information on the internet. But artificial intelligence did not simply scan that data: it also processed all of it at remarkable speed, making sense of it to generate the response that best matched the human prompt it was given.

From self-driving cars to virtual assistants, artificial intelligence has already begun changing the way people live and work. As it advances alongside the underlying technology, AI is giving machines the ability to process data, learn, and adapt on their own, and ultimately to make certain decisions themselves. That will make these systems far more efficient and effective than they are today. By automating the repetitive tasks that eat up people's time, artificial intelligence will free them to focus on more creative and rewarding work.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Intelligence is defined as the sum of a person's ability to think, reason, perceive objective facts, exercise judgment, and draw conclusions.1 Artificial intelligence, in turn, is the process of analyzing all of these abilities through various technologies and instilling them in machines.

Several subfields feed into artificial intelligence, including:

• Machine learning, which develops the algorithms and statistical models that let computers learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed;
• Natural language processing (NLP), which handles the interaction between computers and human language, including speech recognition and generation, text analysis, and machine translation;
• Robotics, which designs and develops robots capable of carrying out tasks autonomously or under varying degrees of human supervision;
• Computer vision, which is concerned with a machine's ability to interpret and understand visual information from the world.

A characteristic recent example is ChatGPT, an AI chatbot built by the research company OpenAI that can hold human-like, prompt-based conversations and has become hugely popular. Trained on millions of pieces of text from the internet, ChatGPT can generate human-like text in a wide range of formats, including paragraphs, articles, and even poetry. Another example is DALL-E, an AI-powered image and video generation tool, also developed by OpenAI. One of DALL-E’s distinctive features is its ability to create images from text descriptions.

The biggest driver behind AI’s rapid progress is that it is fed by data gathered from human activity, such as online communication, social interaction, device usage, search queries, content consumption, and tools like the internet of things (IoT).

AI systems draw on the power of cloud computing and machine learning algorithms to make sense of these vast, complex volumes of data. Machine learning means machines developing algorithms from thousands of examples, largely through image processing, in a programmed, routine, and automated way that lets them behave more like humans.3 These data pools are used to carry out cognitive functions and to train AI algorithms.

Artificial intelligence can embody different dimensions of human intelligence. But to determine whether it has reached the point where it can be distinguished from human intelligence, the British mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptanalyst Alan Turing devised a benchmark for whether machines and computers are capable of thought, known as the “Turing test.”4

No artificial intelligence has yet been developed that can perceive the world without needing commands, reflect on its own thoughts, draw on its own accumulated knowledge to answer new questions and problems, and pass the Turing test. Work toward building a synthetic brain with these capabilities is nonetheless still underway.5

How Is Artificial Intelligence Revolutionizing the Way We Defend People in Court?

Work in recent years on using artificial intelligence to defend people in court and at various stages of the legal system carries the potential to be revolutionary. From gathering evidence to analyzing it and providing legal representation, AI is being developed further every day so that it can increase the efficiency and accuracy of the legal process.

In a groundbreaking move expected in the coming days, an AI chatbot built for this purpose may be used in a courtroom to provide legal support to two people accused of exceeding the speed limit. Wearing wireless earpieces, the defendants would relay what the judge says to the AI system, which would process that input, offer a range of defense options, and let the defendants present their case using those options.

In 2015, the British entrepreneur Joshua Browder built an AI chatbot that helps users contest parking tickets and other legal problems. Designed especially for people who lack the money and knowledge to fight a parking ticket or similar legal matter on their own, the bot aims to make the legal system more accessible and user-friendly. AI systems have previously been used in the United States to help judges with parole decisions and to predict a defendant's likelihood of reoffending.6 But having artificial intelligence defend one of the parties directly, in person, in a courtroom, at hearings scheduled for the coming months, would be the first case of its kind.7 It is a development that has sparked debate over AI's role in the legal system and how it might be used to improve the legal process.

What Are the Potential Benefits and Drawbacks of Using AI in Legal Defense?

One benefit of AI technology in legal defense is its ability to gather and analyze large volumes of data and evidence quickly. By analyzing the evidence it collects, an AI system can make the process both more efficient and more accurate. By their very nature, AI tools can scan documents, case law, and other relevant information in far less time than a lawyer could. That can help lawyers identify the key points and build stronger cases for their clients.

Another significant benefit AI technology can offer in legal defense is the ability to provide simple legal advice to people who lack sufficient financial resources, making the right to a defense easier to access for everyone regardless of their financial situation.

Alongside these benefits, there are potential drawbacks worth keeping in mind when using AI in legal defense. Legal documents and contracts generated by AI may not be as accurate and complete as those drafted by lawyers. AI may also carry ethical concerns, since it may not fully understand or be able to handle the details of a complex case. It cannot approach a case the way a lawyer would, and may fail to grasp its context and background.

More importantly, trust, one of humanity's basic emotional needs, is a sine qua non of the attorney-client relationship. People have evolutionarily been shown to trust others who resemble them, who listen to them, and who blend empathy with analytical and emotional intelligence. From that standpoint, how much trust AI can earn from clients remains an open question. Likewise, even AI that performs well in legal defense raises questions about what it can do to address the emotional states of the different stakeholders in a decision, such as the judge, prosecutor, and client, and whether it can ever really replace a human being.

The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Türkiye's Judiciary

In Türkiye too, more than eight thousand Court of Cassation decisions were reportedly uploaded to a system in 2022, with the stated plan that an AI tool, still under development, would go on to analyze them.8 In statements from the President of the Court of Cassation, the AI-powered system was said to make it easier to disseminate case law accurately and effectively, helping the Court fulfill its duty of ensuring consistency in its case law.9

The Court of Cassation Case-Law Center is being developed as part of a project called ‘Strengthening the Institutional Capacity of the Court of Cassation,’ run jointly by the Presidency of the Court of Cassation and the Council of Europe. It is designed to guide both citizens and members of the judiciary. Its goals include giving access to the Court's precedent-setting decisions, announcing changes in case law after legislative amendments, and, eventually, assessing data and evidence to forecast the likelihood of winning a case and advise citizens on whether or not to file suit.

The AI system the Court of Cassation is developing also raises a number of legal and ethical concerns. One of the biggest worries is that the system could produce decisions in violation of the principle of non-discrimination. AI systems that learn and make decisions by training on data and algorithms will produce discriminatory and biased outcomes if the data used to train them contains bias or discrimination. If, for instance, an AI system built for use in the judiciary is trained on cases carrying past discriminatory bias and is not designed to recognize and correct the discriminatory conduct that can arise within the legal system, its decisions could discriminate against particular individuals or groups. Preventing such discriminatory outcomes requires that AI systems be built with justice, transparency, and accountability as priorities from the outset.

One of the most common examples of this is facial recognition systems, which have higher error rates for people with darker skin and for women.11 Cases like these can disproportionately affect various groups of people by misidentifying them, leading to wrongful arrests. Another example is AI systems used in hiring, which can be biased against particular groups of people based on factors like gender, race, or age.12 This underlines how important it is to develop AI systems that are fair and impartial.

Using AI to predict whether citizens should file suit could also reduce access to justice for groups that face discrimination in society based on factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, or sexual orientation. Legal professionals can take these factors into account and act accordingly, but when AI systems are used to predict the outcome of a case or advise citizens on whether to sue, failing to account for such factors could result in fewer cases being filed on behalf of marginalized communities.

Conclusion

As we move toward integrating artificial intelligence into the legal system, it will be essential to strike a balance between technological progress and safeguarding fundamental human rights. Using AI systems in areas like these should not reduce citizens’ access to justice, nor should it worsen existing social inequalities.

AI-powered legal defense tools should be developed with the goal of promoting equal access to legal services for all individuals, including marginalized communities. That can be achieved by promoting transparency, accountability, and fairness in the development and deployment of AI systems, and by ensuring that AI-related decisions are made in keeping with the rule of law, privacy, and human dignity.

Authors: Att. Altuğ Özgün, Trainee Att. Alp Mete Şirin

References

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• https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/
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