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The Delusion of ‘AI Justice’

As AI seeps deeper into our judicial system, boosters insist it will bring both fairness and efficiency. But can we really trust Judge Grok?

Justice is often depicted as a blindfolded woman holding scales—but in real life, Justice is more like Santa Claus holding a shotgun. It sees everything: It sees whether you are rich or poor, whether you are powerful or powerless—and it sure as hell sees whether you are Black or white. Those observations tip the scales before any evidence is weighed. The idea of “blind justice” is a pure fiction, a cruel one invented by the rich, powerful, and white to justify the fickle, unfair, and prejudiced outcomes their legal system regularly produces.

In the United States, Black Americans suffer acutely from this failure. Black people experience an entirely different justice system than white people do, and almost everybody knows it. We are treated as guilty until “exonerated.” We are judged by predominantly white juries. We are tried under laws written by white people, for white people, and approved by white people, under a Constitution written by our white captors and enslavers. Even when we are murdered, we are put on trial so that the white people who killed us can walk free. I wouldn’t wish for my worst enemy to face justice-while-Black.

And the system isn’t much kinder to women, or poor people, or people who practice a non-Christian faith or live non-heteronormative lives. There is a “justice gap” in this country, and despite nearly a century’s worth of efforts to make the justice system apply to everyone equally, the results have been underwhelming.

Now, however, there is a new tool, widely promoted by rich white people, that purports to bridge the yawning gap between these different justice systems. That tool is artificial intelligence, and its boosters are sure that the robots are here to help. They tell us that the machines can produce justice more “efficiently,” bringing fair legal resolutions to people who do not have the resources to buy expensive lawyers, or the time to wait for the slow grinding of the wheels of justice. They tell us that the algorithms can bring an unbiased approach to sentencing and bail proceedings. They tell us that while AI should never fully “replace” human judges, the large language models can be a useful analytical tool for everything from statutory interpretation to determining what words are commonly thought to mean.

According to one such booster: “Technology, especially AI, can expand legal assistance and drive costs way down. That promises to democratize justice, helping those who have long taken their lumps and done without help.” That’s not a quote from Elon Musk or Sam Altman. That’s from Stephanos Bibas, a federal judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, appointed by Donald Trump.

That’s also not how it’s gonna work. AI justice is largely being designed and promoted by private businesspeople interested in creating profits, not justice. It’s a closed-source, proprietary product, meaning that the beeps and boops that constitute its “reasoning” and “decision-making” cannot be exposed, analyzed, or argued against on appeal but can be tweaked in secret whenever a wealthy tech bro doesn’t like the AI outcomes. And AI justice will ultimately be just as biased as real judges, because all it can fundamentally do is spit back out to us all of the garbage racism we’ve poured into our justice system.

AI justice can mean a lot of things—everything from a human judge using an algorithm to advise them on how to set bail to an AI judge that assesses evidence, weighs arguments, and issues binding rulings. Some people want to limit the use of the term AI to mean just “generative AI,” and the term AI justice to apply only to situations where a computer issues a final ruling. But to my mind, a judge who pulls out Claude instead of a dictionary to look up the meaning of a word in a statute is “using AI.”

Many countries are integrating AI into their judicial processes. Estonia is using AI judges to handle its version of small-claims court. Argentina is using AI to automate various processes and even using ChatGPT to draft legal rulings. Countries from the United Kingdom to Russia to Morocco are using AI in various ways to streamline legal processes. But no place has gone as far as China. Under Xi Jinping, China is on the leading edge of the robot-judge revolution. It has implemented a number of judicial reforms, including integrating information technology into all aspects of jurisprudence to create what it calls “smart courts.” Records are digitized, hearings happen online, automation is everywhere. Most of the reforms are designed to improve jurisprudential efficiency, in accordance with the slogan “Striving to make the people feel fairness and justice in every judicial case.”

China also employs AI judges. The government claims that millions of cases each year are adjudicated by AI, including financial disputes, product-liability cases, and even civil-rights cases. According to a Law360 report on the process, the AI is embodied by a “holographic judge [who] looks like a real person but is a synthesized, 3D image of different judges.” In Beijing, AI-judged cases can go from registration to resolution in an average of 40 days, with hearings lasting 37 minutes. According to reports, 98 percent of those AI rulings are accepted by the litigants and not appealed.

While legal and cultural differences between China and the United States abound (appealing a ruling you’ve lost is as ingrained in American culture as mass shootings and stealing land), human adjudication is slow and inefficient in both........

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