In New Zealand, a judge wrestles with AI-assisted apology

A judge in New Zealand who discovered last week that apology letters from a defendant in an arson case had been written with the help of artificial intelligence raised questions about the sincerity of her sentiments.“The issue of remorse is interesting,” said the judge, Tom Gilbert, of the district court in Christchurch, as he mulled the punishment of a woman who had pleaded guilty to arson and other charges. Remorse can be a mitigating factor in sentencing. Her letters to the victims and the court were nicely written, the judge said. “Out of curiosity I punched into two AI tools ‘draft me a letter for a judge expressing remorse,’” the judge said, according to a transcript of the sentencing hearing. “It became immediately apparent that these were two AI-generated letters, albeit with tweaks around the edges.”Judge Gilbert said he was not criticising the defendant’s use of AI. “But certainly when one is considering the genuineness of an individual’s remorse, simply producing a computer-generated letter does not really take me anywhere as far as I am concerned,” he said, according to the transcript.The judge was not alone in wrestling with the question of authenticity in AI-assisted writing. Increasingly, people are outsourcing many tasks to machines, including writing apologies, eulogies and wedding vows inviting the ire of some of their fellow humans.Social scientists say the questions raised by use of these tools go beyond etiquette. “It’s a mirror into who we are and what we care about as humans,” Jim Everett, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kent in Britain, said about the case.Everett worked on a series of recent studies on the perception of AI use and users. Across the six studies Everett worked on, 4,000 participants were asked about 20 tasks. The aim was to understand how people perceive those who use AI. “AI is a tool for efficiency, and it can be helpful, but it also typically involves, and signals, reduced effort,” Everett said. But the use of such tools acts as a kind of proxy for character traits, the researchers found. The findings suggest that people generally perceived those using AI as lazier, less competent and less trustworthy, and their work as less meaningful.The situation in the New Zealand court was a real-life test of the perceptions that the researchers sought to identify. “An AI could be perfectly trained on all apologies but one might still think that a specific apology it then generates in a new instance is not authentic because it does not come from the kind of processes deemed important in an apology: a personal recollection of the wrong, a commitment to change,” the study said.Judge Gilbert said he was willing to give the defendant some credit for genuine remorse. But he granted only a 5% reduction in the sentence. He sentenced the defendant to 27 months in prison.