Vidhi Centre of Law and Policy has undertaken extensive research and launched the report "Responsible AI for the Indian Justice System" that saw the presence of eminent speakers such as CJI, S A Bobde, sitting Supreme Court Judge, Justice L Nageswara Rao and former Supreme Court Judge Justice (retd) BN Srikrishna along with Christoph Winter, visiting scholar at Harvard University and Partha P Chakrabarti from IIT, Kharagpur. 

With the growing development and deployment of AI in all walks of life, the report focuses on the potential use-cases of AI in the Indian judiciary system. Based on a global survey, the report also highlights the multiple challenges that lies ahead and charts out a roadmap that can provide an ethical framework for the use of this technology. 

The launch of the paper was followed by an insightful discussion by experts to identify possible areas of application of AI in the Indian judiciary system. Here we focus on two interesting discussions that took the limelight. 

Justice Bobde mentioned that for the Indian judiciary this decade will mark a crucial phase as we work towards more technological integration and actively pursue the potential of AI for other system. He added that in November 2019, he launched an indigenous neural translation tool, Suwas, which translates judgements and other legal documents from English to nine other vernacular dialects and vice versa. He further mentioned that the Supreme Court’s AI committee has been working on designing and deploying intelligent and sophisticated technology for the past years. However, at the same point of time, he pointed out that there has been an approach avoidance conflict in our relationship with AI. For this he opined the need to establish a governance and ethics framework that allows for a responsible design and deployment of AI in the justice system. 

The other interesting topic was briefly discussed by Prof. Christoph Winter, who gave some insights on how the challenges in AI can be addressed for its safe and ethical deployment. He crisply addressed two questions, a) why think about AI partially replacing the human decision-making and b) what to think about this technology. He mentioned that AI might offer dramatic increase not only in existing justice but also reasoning based on bias-free algorithms. He used the survey results to throw some interesting facts: a) within the next 25 years, roughly 30% of human judicial decision-making will be outsourced to AI and b) AI will take over more than 50% of judicial decision making at some point of time. Based on these inputs, he pointed out there might be some issues arising which we are not presently aware of or is being currently neglected.  He believes that the judiciary may be perceived as less democratic if a vast portion of it is conducted by AI rather than humans. He repeated the need to start discussing these problems at the earliest rather than waiting for it to build up in the future. 

Justice Srikrishna discussed the necessity for openly accessible judicial datasets and the need for adequate stakeholder engagement. He added that it is important that all of us realize that AI is just a means and not the end. The end of judicial system is to deliver justice and hence we need to harness AI to achieve this objective. However, on the flip side, he pointed out that traditionally our courts and judges are very conservative in the matter of sharing data. Therefore, there has to be a propagation and inducement to make data sharing possible. To add to this there is also a need for data protection from being breached. 

Image by Sang Hyun Cho from Pixabay