AI may perpetuate past injustices – SC’s Leonen

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) could perpetuate past injustices by reproducing biases in historical data and overlooking the circumstances of individual cases, Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen said. “A past injustice is never authority,” Leonen said in a lecture at the University of the Philippines College of Law in Diliman, Quezon City, on Oct. 12. He added that AI can identify patterns and calculate frequencies but cannot necessarily explain the realities behind the data. Citing the disproportionate number of poor people accused in criminal cases, Leonen said reliance on statistics alone could lead to the mistaken conclusion that poverty is the main driver of criminal behavior. He added that judges must consider the circumstances of each individual rather than make decisions based solely on statistical patterns or a person’s membership in a particular group. “In a court of law, you look at the individual not because it is the product of a society. You look at an individual because it’s an individual,” Leonen said. Leonen also warned that AI could fail to capture important details of human experiences, particularly when information is converted into data used to train computer systems. He illustrated this with the account of a woman testifying in court who twice paused because she struggled to find the words to describe her experience. An interpreter rendered her testimony without the pauses, while a voice-to-text application subsequently converted the account into a transcript. The testimony, he said, could eventually become a data point used to train an AI system, potentially obscuring details that help explain the witness’s experience. “You cannot record the weeping. You cannot record the pauses. That’s the reality. But it is represented by the words,” Leonen said. Leonen said that AI could assist courts but must never replace judges.