> what they are buying is the justice

From The Truth by Terry Pratchett, with particular emphasis on the book's footnote.

> William’s family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens, and other parts where you found criminals. It had come a shock to them... no, he corrected himself, it had come as a an affront to learn that [police chief] Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he'd instructed his men to use the front door when calling on any building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant. [0]

> [0] William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.

Sure, but I'm not sure how AI would solve any of that.

Any claims of objectivity would be challenged based on how it was trained. Public opinion would confirm its priors as it already does (see accusations of corruption or activism with any judicial decision the mob disagrees with, regardless of any veracity). If there's a human appeals process above it, you've just added an extra layer that doesn't remove the human corruption factor at all.

As for corruption, in my opinion we're reading some right now. Human-in-the-loop AI doesn't have the exponential, world-altering gains that companies like OpenAI need to justify their existence. You only get that if you replace humans completely, which is why they're all shilling science fiction nonsense narratives about nobody having to work. The abstract of this paper leans heavily into that narrative

Oddly enough, Texas passed reform to keep sexting teens from getting prosecuted when: they are both under 18 and less than two years difference in age. It was regarded as a model for other states. It's the only positive thing I have heard of Texas legislating wrt sexuality.

Whole "democracy" thing is legal framework that wealthy and powerful people built to make safe wealth transfer down the generations possible while giving away as little as possible to average joe.

In a countries without this legal framework its usually free for all fight every time ruling power changes. Not good for preserving capital.

So wealthy having more rights is system working as intended. Not inherently bad thing either as alternative system is whoever best with AK47 having more rights.

I think "judge AI" would be better if it also had access to a complete legislative record of debate surrounding the establishment of said laws, so that it could perform a "sanity check" whether its determinations are also consistent with the stated intent of lawmakers.

One might imagine a distant future where laws could be dramatically simplified into plain-spoken declarations, to be interpreted by a very advanced (and ideally true open source) future LLM. So instead of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2251–2260 the law could be as straightforward as:

A child must never be used, displayed, or represented as an object of sexual gratification. Responsibility extends to those who assist, enable, profit from, or intentionally access such material. The aim of this prohibition is to protect children from sexual exploitation and to eliminate any market or incentive for it.

> If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place.

Codifying what is morally acceptable into definitive rules has been something humanity has struggled with for likely much longer than written memory. Also while you're out there "fixing bugs" - millions of them and one-by-one - people are affected by them.

> I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.

Ae we really going to outsource morality to an unfeeling machine that is trained to behave like an exclusive club of people want it to?

If that was one's goal, that's one way to stealthily nudge and undermine a democracy I suppose.

There are no “bugs” in human institutions like law. There are always going to be edge cases and nuances that require a human to evaluate.

It's not a bug, it's something politicians don't want to touch because nobody wants to be the person that is soft on anything to do with minors and sex. Of course our laws are completely illogical - the fact that you could be put in prison and a sex offender registry for life for having a single photo of a naked 17 year old (how in the hell were you supposed to know?) on your device is ridiculous.

But, again, who is going to decide to put forward a bill to change that? It's all risk and no reward for the politician.

Fair, but still, the legislative process takes alot of time, and judicial norms and precedent allow for discretion to be exercised with accountability, which also informs the legislative process.

AI would be great IF they know what to find

The state of current AI does not give them ability to know that, so the consideration is likely to be dropped

Start fixing those bugs, you will open up can after can of worms.

Finding the bugs- will be entertaining.

now you are talking about replacing not judges, but your elected representatives.

It isn't "my scenario". These are real cases.

https://www.aclu-mn.org/press-releases/victory-judge-dismiss...

"In his decision, Judge Cajacob asserts that the purpose and intent of Minnesota’s child pornography statute does not support punishing Jane Doe for explicit images of herself and doing so “produces an absurd, unreasonable, and unjust result that utterly confounds the statue’s stated purpose.”"

Nothing in there about "likeability" or "we let her off because she had nice tits" (which would be particularly weird in this case). Judges have a degree of discretion to interpret laws, they still have to justify their decisions. If you think the judge is wrong then you can appeal. This is how the law has always worked, and if you've thought otherwise then consider you've been living under this "insane system" for your entire life, and every generation of ancestors has too, assuming you're/they've been in the US.

Are you even responding to the right comment? I read your comment and the parent comment you've responded to and this response doesn't make sense - it reads like a non-sequitur.

This is basically how the administrative courts work now - an ALJ takes a first pass at your case, and then you can complain about it to a district court, who can review it without doing their own fact-finding. But the reason we can do this is that we trust ALJs (and all trial-level judges, as well as juries) to make good assessments on the credibility of evidence and testimony, a competency I don’t suspect folks are ready or willing to hand over to AI.

The courts already have algorithmic oracles for specific judgements, like sentencing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPAS_(software)

I don't follow your reasoning at all. Without a specific input stating that you can't be your own victim, how would the AI catch this? In what cases does that specific input even make sense? Attempted suicide removes one's own autonomy in the eyes of the law in many ways in our world - would the aforementioned specific input negate appropriate decisions about said autonomy?

I don't see how an AI / LLM can cope with this correctly.

When discussing AI regulation, when I asked that they thought there should be a mechanism to appeal any determination made by an AI they had said that they had been advocating for that to go both ways, that people should be able to ask for an AI review of human made decisions and in the event of an inconsistency the issue is raised at a higher level.

To get to an appeal means you obviously already have a judgement against you - and as you can imagine in the cases like the one above that's enough to ruin your life completely and forever, even if you win on appeal.

Because historically appeal systems are well crafted and efficient? Please... at least read your comment out loud to yourself.

In Federal courts mandatory minimum sentences were judged to be unconstitutional, as the ability to individualize sentencing was considered a prerogative intrinsic to the role of [Federal] judges. Though, a judge cannot impose a sentence greater than the maximum allowed under law. Federal courts still have sentencing guidelines that are almost always applied, but strictly speaking they're advisory.

More fundamentally, individualized justice is a core principle of common law courts, at least historically speaking. It's also an obscure principle, but you can't fully understand the system without it, including the wide latitude judges often wield in various (albeit usually highly technical) aspects of their job.

I’ve never heard of vigilante justice against someone already sentenced to prison for life, just because they were sentenced in a place without capital punishment?

(I mean - people get killed in prison sometimes, I suppose, but it’s not really like vigilante justice on the streets is causing a breakdown in society in Australia, say…)

True, but its not a free for all. Judges (especially in a common law juridsiction) are supposed to be consistent and interpret laws following certain principles. There are more right and less right interpretations - thus we can grade judges on how well they do their job.

Another example is that in the Netherlands, there's a crime called "valsheid in geschriften" which exists to make it easy to prosecute fraud. It states that if you create a document with false information with the intent to use that document to deceive, you can get up to 5 years of jail time or some really big fine. Is lying on a paper insurance form to get a cheaper premium breaking this law? This doesn't seem clear cut to me.

Given TFA, it seems that having human determinations involved might run the risk of prejudicing the AI.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I actually asked ChatGPT and it said my client is not guilty.”

Different skills or plugins, different views and different tools for the analysis of the same object. Then the debate starts.