Superior Council of Magistrature admits it will open investigation
Over a month since the bizarre case of three appeal court judges being accused of using AI in a ruling using “strange expressions, careless Portuguese and citations of articles that don’t exist in the law”, lawyers acting for defendants affected have pushed the Superior Council of Magistrature to open an investigation.
Initially, the three judges involved refuted accusations that they had used a form of ChatGPT to draft their ruling, and it looked like the situation might be allowed to dribble away.
But defence lawyers representing various defendants have refused to give up: they are convinced that the judges not only used artificial intelligence to draft their final ruling, but that the artificial intelligence was/ is flawed.
No less than 12 lawyers are now involved in this challenge affecting appeal court judges Alfredo Costa, Hermengarda Valle-Frias and Margarida Ramos de Almeida, which the Superior Council of Magistratura has agreed to analyse in its upcoming meetings.
As Correio da Manhã explains today, there are “various tools available on the Internet to detect if a text has been produced by artificial intelligence”. The lawyers pushing for this inquiry have availed themselves of them.
The site GPTZero, for example, has found that a part of the ruling on ‘the crime of economic participation in business “had a 99% probability of having been generated by a programme of artificial intelligence.
“A similar result was obtained from the site ‘originality.ai’ (…) The site also guarantees that some of the references in the text on the crime of abuse of power were totally generated by artificial intelligence”.
But the three judges have not only refuted the accusations made by lawyers, they suggested the very idea that they might have used artificial intelligence could configure “an infraction of duties of urbanity”, bearing in mind the “inappropriate language” used.
CM adds that the members of the Superior Council of Magistrature used “great caution” when they approached this issue in December, and decided, unanimously, that there was no reason for any kind of intervention “at this moment”.
“This is something that will change at the next meeting”, adds the paper.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
