US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has called for “caution and humility” over the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal field.

In his 13-page year-end report, Roberts said that he was “confident that technological changes will continue to transform our work,” and dismissed the technology’s potential to replace judges due to its inability to replicate the human discretion which is essential for the job.

He notes: “I predict that human judges will be around for a while. But with equal confidence I predict that judicial work – particularly at the trial level – will be significantly affected by AI. Those changes will involve not only how judges go about doing their job, but also how they understand the role that AI plays in the cases that come before them.”

AI’s ability to comprehend and interpret vast data sets in a short period of time could increase access to justice for indigent litigants, while also assisting courts with legal research.

But while he celebrates AI’s potential, one particular case stood out to the George W. Bush appointed Chief Justice from 2023 in which AI “hallucinations” caused the lawyers using the application to submit briefs with citations to non-existent cases.

He also cites the issues of legal scholars who “have raised concerns about whether entering confidential information into an AI tool might compromise later attempts to invoke legal privileges,” while also considering the persistent public perception of a “human-AI fairness gap”.

The role of AI in the US legal field was brought to the fore last month when a federal appeals court in New Orleans unveiled the first proposed rule by any of the 13 US appeals courts aimed at regulating the use of generative AI tools by lawyers. The proposed rule will require lawyers to certify that they either did not rely on AI to draft briefs or, if GenAI tools were used, that humans reviewed the accuracy of any text.

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