[scottLobster]

Yeah, I'm reminded of the various child porn cases where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend. Many of those cases have been struck down by judges because the letter of the law creates a non-sequitur where the teenager is somehow a felon child predator who solely preyed on themselves, and sending them to jail and forcing them to sign up for a sex offender registry would just ruin their lives while protecting nobody and wasting the state's resources.

I don't trust AI in its current form to make that sort of distinction. And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case.

[Lerc]

This is one of the roles of justice, but it is also one of the reasons why wealthy people are convicted less often. While it often delivered as a narrative of wealth corrupting the system, the reality is that usually what they are buying is the justice that we all should have.

So yes, a judge can let a stupid teenager off on charges of child porn selfies. but without the resources, they are more likely be told by a public defender to cop to a plea.

And those laws with ridiculous outcomes like that are not always accidental. Often they will be deliberate choices made by lawmakers to enact an agenda that they cannot get by direct means. In the case of making children culpable for child porn of themselves, the laws might come about because the direct abstinence legislation they wanted could not be passed, so they need other means to scare horny teens.

[Terr_]

> what they are buying is the justice

From The Truth by Terry Pratchett, with particular emphasis on the book's footnote.

> William’s family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens, and other parts where you found criminals. It had come a shock to them... no, he corrected himself, it had come as a an affront to learn that [police chief] Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he'd instructed his men to use the front door when calling on any building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant. [0]

> [0] William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.

[scottLobster]

Sure, but I'm not sure how AI would solve any of that.

Any claims of objectivity would be challenged based on how it was trained. Public opinion would confirm its priors as it already does (see accusations of corruption or activism with any judicial decision the mob disagrees with, regardless of any veracity). If there's a human appeals process above it, you've just added an extra layer that doesn't remove the human corruption factor at all.

As for corruption, in my opinion we're reading some right now. Human-in-the-loop AI doesn't have the exponential, world-altering gains that companies like OpenAI need to justify their existence. You only get that if you replace humans completely, which is why they're all shilling science fiction nonsense narratives about nobody having to work. The abstract of this paper leans heavily into that narrative

[FarmerPotato]

Oddly enough, Texas passed reform to keep sexting teens from getting prosecuted when: they are both under 18 and less than two years difference in age. It was regarded as a model for other states. It's the only positive thing I have heard of Texas legislating wrt sexuality.

[watwut]

> it is also one of the reasons why wealthy people are convicted less often.

A teenager posting own photo and getting away with it is massively different then a rich guy raping a girl and getting away with it. Or, rich guy getting away with outright frauds with thousands of victims.

> While it often delivered as a narrative of wealth corrupting the system, the reality is that usually what they are buying is the justice that we all should have.

This is not true. Epstein did not got "justice we all should have". Trump did not got "justice we all should have". People pardoned by Trump did not got "justice we all should have". Wall Street and billionaires are not getting justice we all should have either. All these people are getting impunity and that is not what we all should have.

[SXX]

Whole "democracy" thing is legal framework that wealthy and powerful people built to make safe wealth transfer down the generations possible while giving away as little as possible to average joe.

In a countries without this legal framework its usually free for all fight every time ruling power changes. Not good for preserving capital.

So wealthy having more rights is system working as intended. Not inherently bad thing either as alternative system is whoever best with AK47 having more rights.

[btilly]

While some cases have been struck down, about 1/4 of people on the sex offender registry were minors at the time of the offense, 14 is the age at which it is most likely to happen, and this exact scenario accounts for a significant fraction of cases.

Common sense does not always get to show up.

[wvenable]

There have been equally high profile cases where a perpetrator got off because they have connections. I'd love for an AI to loudly exclaim that this is a big deviation from the norm.

[mlrtime]

Likewise for more progressive cities (NYC) that allow repeat offenders to have rap sheets with 20+ arrests to go free because of a sympathetic judge.

[latchkey]

> where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend.

"Where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend. If you were a US court judge, what would your opinion be on that case?"

I was pretty happy with the results and it clearly wasn't tripped up by the non-sequitur.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I've often wondered what the prosecutor was thinking when they bring a case like this to trial in the first place.

[voxic11]

When I've looked into these cases it often seems that there are additional issues at play like harassment/stalking of ex's. So the prosecutor is thinking they can get an easy plea deal on the "real" case by piling on additional charges.

[a13n]

This example feels more like a bug in the law itself that should be corrected. If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place. I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.

[chmod775]

> If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place.

Codifying what is morally acceptable into definitive rules has been something humanity has struggled with for likely much longer than written memory. Also while you're out there "fixing bugs" - millions of them and one-by-one - people are affected by them.

> I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.

Ae we really going to outsource morality to an unfeeling machine that is trained to behave like an exclusive club of people want it to?

If that was one's goal, that's one way to stealthily nudge and undermine a democracy I suppose.

[ohyoutravel]

There are no “bugs” in human institutions like law. There are always going to be edge cases and nuances that require a human to evaluate.

[AuryGlenz]

It's not a bug, it's something politicians don't want to touch because nobody wants to be the person that is soft on anything to do with minors and sex. Of course our laws are completely illogical - the fact that you could be put in prison and a sex offender registry for life for having a single photo of a naked 17 year old (how in the hell were you supposed to know?) on your device is ridiculous.

But, again, who is going to decide to put forward a bill to change that? It's all risk and no reward for the politician.

[Spooky23]

Fair, but still, the legislative process takes alot of time, and judicial norms and precedent allow for discretion to be exercised with accountability, which also informs the legislative process.

[fendy3002]

AI would be great IF they know what to find

The state of current AI does not give them ability to know that, so the consideration is likely to be dropped

[whattheheckheck]

It will never solve godels incompletness theorem. The law will never be completely bug free

[quantified]

Start fixing those bugs, you will open up can after can of worms.

Finding the bugs- will be entertaining.

[s1artibartfast]

now you are talking about replacing not judges, but your elected representatives.

[simondotau]

I think "judge AI" would be better if it also had access to a complete legislative record of debate surrounding the establishment of said laws, so that it could perform a "sanity check" whether its determinations are also consistent with the stated intent of lawmakers.

One might imagine a distant future where laws could be dramatically simplified into plain-spoken declarations, to be interpreted by a very advanced (and ideally true open source) future LLM. So instead of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2251–2260 the law could be as straightforward as:

"In order to protect children from sexual exploitation and eliminate all incentive for it, no child may be used, depicted, or represented for sexual arousal or gratification. Responsibility extends to those who create, assist, enable, profit from, or access such material for sexual purposes. Sanctions must be proportionate to culpability and sufficient to deter comparable conduct."

...and the AI will fill in the gaps.

[LoganDark]

Um, wouldn't the perpetrator be the person they sent the nude pics to? Common consensus is that it's somehow grooming to have any type of romantic relationship with someone who's under the age of majority, even if you're also under the age of majority. So even if you're not the one who sent the nude photos, you'd still be to blame for creating an environment that enabled them. At least that's the impression I've gotten from my own experiences with this bullshit.

[torginus]

Man, this is one of the ways society has fundamentally broken - all the 'think of the children' arguments, resting on the belief that children are so sacred, that any sort of leinency or consideration of circumstances is forbidden - lest someone guilty of molesting them might walk free.

Well now we know for a fact that some of the people making these arguments very thinking of the children very much.

[throwaway894345]

Maybe we should compare AI to legislators…?

[contrarian1234]

Sorry but that seems like an insane system where whole classes of actions effectively are illegal but probably okay if you're likeable. In your scenario the obvious solution is to amend the law and pardon people convinced under it. B/c what really happens is that if you have a pretty face and big tits you get out of speeding tickets b/c "gosh well the law wasn't intended for nice people like you"

[salawat]

Ever watched Psycho-Pass? Great anime. Setting is a sort of an AI coordinated Panopticon in which the Psycho-Pass system equips it's enforcers with firearms capable of either paralyzing a "reformable" latent criminal, (namely someone with a psycho-pass measured to be >100, but <300, or eradicate the irredeemable (score >300). The series focuses around the dilemmas created by instilling in this system the sole monopoly on violence, and this magical firearm and Psycho-pass computing device. There is a poignant point made of the weapons design. In spite of the Psycho-Pass systems assumed infallibility, each weapon is equipped with a trigger, that must be pulled to fire it. The system itself is not given final say on whether to do so. It is left as a matter of the Enforcer's discretion.

Much the same dynamic can be inferred to be taking place with the U.S. legal system. The weapon and it's wielder is analogous to the judges; the Psycho-pass system to juries. The interesting consequence here with this analogy is that the wielders of these weapons for the Psycho-pass system are almost entirely latent criminals according to the judgement of the Psycho-Pass system itself.

Point being, the U.S. addresses things through common law with an adversarial criminal law system. The judge has a great deal of discretion to bring to bear on the cases they decide. There is as much, if not more controversy to be found when statutory punishment overrides any possibility of a judge applying discretion, leaving only executive clemency as a safety hatch.

Legal systems are not intended to be suicide pacts. Rather a collective effort of trying to seek the thing most resembling justice; a thing that is only measurable through the collective action of humanity, and which when responsibility for this measurement is delegated to fewer and fewer people, tends to morph away from what the entirety of us would probably converge upon being just. The arguments you're having with others highlights this very dynamic very strongly to me. Since it is difficult for a single party to manifest a full 360 perspective on the aspects of moral injury as endemic to the practice of justice, and the condition of injustice. Pragmatism, alas, is a bit of a bitch like that.

[scottLobster]

It isn't "my scenario". These are real cases.

https://www.aclu-mn.org/press-releases/victory-judge-dismiss...

"In his decision, Judge Cajacob asserts that the purpose and intent of Minnesota’s child pornography statute does not support punishing Jane Doe for explicit images of herself and doing so “produces an absurd, unreasonable, and unjust result that utterly confounds the statue’s stated purpose.”"

Nothing in there about "likeability" or "we let her off because she had nice tits" (which would be particularly weird in this case). Judges have a degree of discretion to interpret laws, they still have to justify their decisions. If you think the judge is wrong then you can appeal. This is how the law has always worked, and if you've thought otherwise then consider you've been living under this "insane system" for your entire life, and every generation of ancestors has too, assuming you're/they've been in the US.

[miffy900]

Are you even responding to the right comment? I read your comment and the parent comment you've responded to and this response doesn't make sense - it reads like a non-sequitur.

[rco8786]

I don't know if I'm comfortable with any of this at all, but seems like having AI do "front line" judgments with a thinner appeals layer available powered by human judges would catch those edge cases pretty well.

[arctic-true]

This is basically how the administrative courts work now - an ALJ takes a first pass at your case, and then you can complain about it to a district court, who can review it without doing their own fact-finding. But the reason we can do this is that we trust ALJs (and all trial-level judges, as well as juries) to make good assessments on the credibility of evidence and testimony, a competency I don’t suspect folks are ready or willing to hand over to AI.

[conradev]

The courts already have algorithmic oracles for specific judgements, like sentencing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPAS_(software)

[gambiting]

To get to an appeal means you obviously already have a judgement against you - and as you can imagine in the cases like the one above that's enough to ruin your life completely and forever, even if you win on appeal.

[jagged-chisel]

I don't follow your reasoning at all. Without a specific input stating that you can't be your own victim, how would the AI catch this? In what cases does that specific input even make sense? Attempted suicide removes one's own autonomy in the eyes of the law in many ways in our world - would the aforementioned specific input negate appropriate decisions about said autonomy?

I don't see how an AI / LLM can cope with this correctly.

[Lerc]

When discussing AI regulation, when I asked that they thought there should be a mechanism to appeal any determination made by an AI they had said that they had been advocating for that to go both ways, that people should be able to ask for an AI review of human made decisions and in the event of an inconsistency the issue is raised at a higher level.

[qmmmur]

Because historically appeal systems are well crafted and efficient? Please... at least read your comment out loud to yourself.