1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

I’m writing in response to CalMatter’s reporting today that the LA and Riverside County Superior Courts are conducting “AI” law clerk pilot programs. LLMs are barely helpful in writing computer code - it’s completely fantastical and a violation of civil rights for them to guide court decisions by drafting memos. CalMatters lists the many ways these language models are biased due to having been made with biased source material. And that’s not even the fundamental problem. This “AI” is just an autopredicter - it’s just putting characters into likely orders based on historical patterns, with no real sense of the actual matter and at a ridiculous utility cost. Commercial LLMs are already becoming prohibitively expensive to use - the State cannot afford to use them at scale. Which is a blessing at this point. But California should take a moral and ethical stand and keep it out of the judicial system entirely.