Avocado teapots. Cats playing chess. How new technology mandates a level of judicial technological competence and understanding.
Bluntly put, judges exist to serve litigants who have disputes. The business of the judiciary is to facilitate the resolution of disputes–whether the dispute is resolved by the judge, a jury or through settlement. Judges are in a service business: like every other service business these days, judges need some basic familiarity and understanding of relevant technology.
.A new technology caught my eye last week that drives this point home. DALL-E, a technology that lets you create digital images by typing in what you want to see, was discussed in a recent New York Times article by Cade Metz. The technology was developed by an outfit called OpenAI, which is backed by a billion dollars in funding from Microsoft. According to OpenAI, DALL-E is “trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs”. It is a “new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”
DALL-E works by recognizing text and then searching millions of images and looking for patterns. The program can then combine pieces of images into a new image that matches what you have asked it to create. The article has images the system found when asked for avocado-shaped teapots and two cats playing chess. The chess-playing cats looked exceptionally realistic. Its described as a potential helpful and time saving tool for so-called commercial artists.
We all need to recognize you can’t always believe what you see
So why talk about this system in a legal tech blog? Two reasons. First, I talked some time ago about the problems so-called deep fakes pose for our legal system. Images or videos that look real but aren’t
