Advances in artificial intelligence can prompt heady predictions of utopia and apocalypse. But they can also prompt reflection about the purpose of the human institutions AI threatens to replace. Take a recent University of Chicago paper pitting real federal judges against ChatGPT.

The bottom line is that real judges appear to be more easily swayed by “legally irrelevant” factors than artificial intelligence presented with the same material. That result, however, contains a delicious duality: It highlights either the manifest fallibility of human judges or their superior wisdom. Perhaps they are one and the same.

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Those findings were first published in 2016 (by researchers Holger Spamann of Harvard and Lars Klöhn of Humboldt University in Berlin) several years before the release of ChatGPT. Now Eric A. Posner and Shivam Saran at the University of Chicago Law School have released a working paper comparing the performance of the judges with that of a modern AI.

Read more at Washington Post