Judges and Magistrates in Peru and Mexico Have ChatGPT Fever

Juan David Gutiérrez is an associate professor at Universidad del Rosario (Colombia) where researches and teaches on public policy and artificial intelligence. Shutterstock In the last week of March, a judge in Peru and a magistrate in Mexico claimed that they used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to motivate a second instance ruling and to illustrate their arguments in a court hearing, respectively. Peruvian and Mexican news reports framed the use of ChatGPT in judicial proceedings as a positive innovation and did not raise concerns about how the chatbot was used. The Peruvian judge and the Mexican magistrate are not the first judicial officials in Latin America who have turned to ChatGPT to draft and/or motivate part of their decisions. In February, I reported about a judge and a magistrate in Colombia that used ChatGPT to draft judicial decisions (Maia Levy Daniel also reported on the cases in Tech Policy Press).  Moreover, at the beginning of March, five of the ten Court of Appeals Judges that participated in the process to fill one of the vacancies of the Supreme Court of Chile discussed the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the judiciary. One of them even referred to the case of the Colombian judge who transcribed four prompts and answers from ChatGPT to motivate his ruling. The new cases in Peru and Mexico demonstrate why the judges should have taken greater care when using large language models (LLMs) in their work. Peruvian judge uses ChatGPT to decide how to do mathematical calculations In…Judges and Magistrates in Peru and Mexico Have ChatGPT Fever