Neil Sands
A mock court hearing focused on artificial intelligence is being held in Auckland this week to examine the promise and pitfalls that the rapidly evolving technology offers the justice system.
New Zealand Police have set up the event at the High Court at Auckland at 6pm on Thursday, which creates a courtroom scenario involving AI that is currently hypothetical but will likely play out in reality very soon.
“[It] aims to explore if our current legal landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand is ready for the challenges that AI will bring… focusing on a criminal law context,” the force’s chief advisor for technology assurance Andrew Chen said in promotional material.
“This is not just about hallucinated citations in submissions. It speaks to the reliability and trust in information presented in court.”
Organisers have made proceedings as authentic as possible – a real judge (Justice Greg Blanchard KC) will preside, real lawyers will present their cases and a real expert witness will give evidence.
Barrister Jacob Parry, a member of the TLANZ Criminal Law Committee, is appearing for the defence.
“So far even just in planning, I’ve found it really interesting. Everyone sort of comes at [AI] from a slightly different point of view,” he told LawNews.
The fictional case involves an accused drug dealer, Phillip Popper, who was identified as a suspect and became the subject of a surveillance operation based solely on analysis of online posts by an AI tool.
In the scenario, Popper is challenging the admissibility of evidence obtained through the surveillance device warrant that was issued on the basis of the AI analysis.
Outsource our reasoning
Parry said it offered an opportunity to examine how the justice system will handle AI.
“This is the challenge,” he said. “Was the warrant obtained unlawfully, because in using that AI product to identify the person in the first place? Had the police actually done their due diligence?
“Is that a valid way of processing information? Is it reliable, in terms of the output that it gives us? The product that they talk about using [in the exercise] is a fictitious product that operates in a sort of a black-box type fashion. So, police in this case didn’t know the underlying algorithm, how it works, what things it pays attention to, or what it places weight on. It doesn’t give an exact explanation of how it matches writing sample one to writing sample two, so there’s a lot of question marks about it.
“And the kind of core question in the court exercise itself is what concerns do we have about outsourcing our own reasoning or standards of belief to something that we may not understand the limitations of?”
Parry said the hypothetical scenario in which AI is used to crunch data and identify a suspect was “not so far outside the realm of what is happening at the moment” and the courts needed to discuss the issues it raised.
“I suppose, in the kind of investigative environment that we have at the moment, where there’s huge amounts of data to be analysed, AI is just the natural solution,” he said.
“So, we’re going to see the use of novel products really, really soon. And understanding how they work, who’s accountable, what the limitations are. It’s really interesting to think about what some of the potential pitfalls are.”
A similar hearing was staged in Christchurch on August 7, and another will take place in the High Court at Wellington on August 21.
But the Auckland edition is the only one to be livestreamed. Access is open and anyone interested can register here.
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