Imagine if civil court cases were decided by artificial intelligence instead of human judges. Some legal professionals say that prospect could become reality in the not-too-distant future.

Amin Ebrahimi Afrouzi, a UCLA law and philosophy postdoctoral fellow, is researching the philosophical questions that could arise from such a scenario. For example, what if AI judges could routinely arrive at the same decisions as human judges? Would there be any effective difference between judgments rendered by AI and humans? Would legal decisions carry different ethical weight if they were AI-generated?

The Law and Philosophy Program is a collaboration between the philosophy department and UCLA School of Law. In addition to interdisciplinary degrees and specializations for philosophy doctoral students and law students, the program offers one- to two-year research postdoctoral fellowships; Afrouzi is one of two fellows in the program currently.

Afrouzi, whose research interests span law, philosophy, and technology, says today’s large language models, like ChatGPT, “could perhaps one day accurately predict the outcome of court cases just by doing statistics,” he says. But using that type of technology in court would mean that judgments were being rendered without anyone considering the actual merits of each case.

Afrouzi’s work is both timely and important, says Seana Shiffrin, faculty co-director of the Law and Philosophy program, professor of philosophy, and the Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice. “The questions and points he is making are absolutely central, speaking to the intrinsic unsuitability of the use of AI to replace human judges.”

Read the full story about Afrouzi and his work on the UCLA Humanities website.