First reported by Vice (opens in new tab), Colombian First Circuit Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia claims to have used ChatGPT during the sentencing process of a trial in Cartagena. The judge testified to his use of the tool in court documents dated January 30 (opens in new tab).

"What we are really looking for is to optimize the time spent drafting the sentence after corroborating the information provided by the AI," Garcia explained in the court document (translated from the original Spanish). Garcia was hearing a case between a health insurance company and a family over medical insurance for autistic children.

Judge Garcia apparently based his final decision in the case on the chatbot's answers regarding case law and jurisprudence, claiming that all the answers were fact-checked in the case. The judge claims that he wanted to speed up the decision-making process in this case, which has little precedent for the use of AI in legal proceedings.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but doesn't this strike you as particularly bad? Isn't it like the job of a judge to be able to go through an exceptionally rigorous educational and professional selection process to prove that we should be part of an elite caste that determines the character of our laws and governance?" Well, now for one of them to opine about children's health care, homework fraud website (opens in new tab).

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the California Bar recently flatly rejected the use of AI chatbots (opens in new tab) as legal counsel, and while AI is certainly not going away (opens in new tab), stories like this make me wonder if somewhere down the road a Butler Crusade (opens in new tab ) will occur, I am forced to revise my internal assessment of the possibility. At the very least, if ChatGPT decides you're not covered by medical insurance, wouldn't you want to relive a scene from "Office Space" (opens in new tab)?