Judge admits he used ChatGPT to write a Court of Appeal ruling

Judge admits he used ChatGPT to write a Court of Appeal ruling as he calls the AI tool ‘jolly useful’

• Lord Justice Birss said he used ChatGPT tool to summarise a familiar area of law
• The judge stressed it should not be relied on for topics you know nothing about

A judge has described ChatGPT as ‘jolly useful’ as he admitted using it when writing a recent Court of Appeal ruling.

Referring to the ‘great potential’ of AI tools, Lord Justice Birss said he used the chatbot when he was summarising an area of law he was already familiar with.

Quoted in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, the intellectual propert law specialist said: ‘I think what is of most interest is that you can ask these large language models to summarise information. It is useful and it will be used and I can tell you, I have used it.

‘I asked ChatGPT can you give me a summary of this area of law, and it gave me a paragraph.

‘I know what the answer is because I was about to write a paragraph that said that, but it did it for me and I put it in my judgment. It’s there and it’s jolly useful.

Lord Justice Birss said he used the chatbot when he was summarising an area of law he was already familiar with

Lord Justice Birss is thought to be the first member of the British judiciary to reveal he used the AI tool to write his judgement

‘I’m taking full personal responsibility for what I put in my judgment, I am not trying to give the responsibility to somebody else.

‘All it did was a task which I was about to do and which I knew the answer to and could recognise as being acceptable.’

The judge, whose remarks were first reported by The Law Society Gazette, did however stress that it should not be relied on for topics you know nothing about.

He is thought to be the first member of the British judiciary to reveal he used the AI tool to write his judgement.

Earlier this year, two New York lawyers were fined for using fake case citations generated by ChatGPT, igniting a debate over the tool’s ‘hallucination problem’ where it makes up false information.

The Judicial Office have been approached for comment.

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