The government has unveiled a plan to use artificial intelligence (AI) to make court transcriptions cheaper and more accessible. Dr. Brian Thornton, a senior lecturer in journalism at Winchester University, gas revealed that the Ministry of Justice will run a trial using its in-house AI, Justice Transcribe, to produce court transcriptions. Pic: Andy Aitchison
Writing for The Conversation, Dr. Thornton reports that a campaign led by survivors of rape and sexual assault has highlighted the difficulty of getting transcriptions of their trials. London’s Victims’ Commissioner Claire Waxman called it a ‘real block to recovery’ for victims, and said one woman had been quoted £30,000 for a transcript of her full trial. The prohibitive cost of court transcripts has long been identified by miscarriage of justice campaigners and journalists as an impediment to revealing injustice – see the 2016 Open Justice Charter.
It was an issue raised last year by Sir David Davis, the former Conservative minister who has been campaigning to overturn the conviction of Lucy Letby, in the House of Commons (reported here). ‘When I asked for a transcript for a major trial recently Manchester Crown Court told me it was £100,000 – when I pressed them it went down to £9,000, but it’s still way beyond the reach of most people,’ said Sir David, who was talking about his experience with the Letby trial. ‘This is a travesty of justice.’ The MP went on to say ‘other countries including American states have free transcripts available now’. ‘When is she going to sort this out?’ he asked.
According to Thornton, the MoJ now recognises there is a problem but he also said there were ‘reasons to be sceptical’ that AI will be able to deliver in the way the MoJ hopes. ‘Accuracy will be an issue, from getting names and places right, to properly representing technical language used by experts,’ the academic writes. ‘But the greater issue may be AI hallucination. This is when AI tools “generate information that seems plausible but is actually inaccurate or misleading.’ He quoted a study by the Thomson Reuters concluding that judicial scepticism about using AI for court documents ‘is not simple technophobia – it’s professional responsibility’. ‘Relied-upon hallucinated information isn’t merely bad output, it can lead to a potential distortion of justice,’ it said.
Thornton also quoted research by the Law Commission which found ‘examples from many jurisdictions’ of lawyers citing hallucinated legal cases. The commission argued for human oversight of AI legal systems and that an overreliance on AI by lawyers ‘may even risk the lawyer being liable for contempt of court’. ‘The scepticism from those working in the criminal justice system is understandable given that any snags when new technologies are introduced can have significant impacts on real people,’ wrote Thornton.’ For example, DNA technology was presented as flawless when it was introduced, but we now know it is not. And just ask someone like Shaun Thompson, who is bringing a legal challenge after the Met police’s live facial recognition technology wrongly identified him as a suspect, about the accuracy of this technology.’
