Researchers have claimed that an artificial intelligence system has correctly predicted the outcomes of hundreds of cases heard at the European Court of Human Rights
The judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have been predicted to 79% accuracy using an artificial intelligence (AI) method developed by researchers at UCL, the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania.
The method is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court by automatically analysing case text using a machine learning algorithm.
As early as the 1960s experts predicted that computers would one day be able to predict the outcomes of judicial decisions.
The Researcher says that “We don’t see AI replacing judges or lawyers, but we think they’d find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes,”
To develop the algorithm, the team allowed an artificially intelligent computer to scan the published judgements from 584 cases relating to torture and degrading treatment, fair trials and privacy.
They computer learned that certain phrases, facts, or circumstances occurred more frequently when there was a violation of the human rights act. After analysing hundreds of cases the computer was able to predict a verdict with 79 per cent accuracy.
