Unrepresentated parties in the family courts are being misled by 'sycophantic' AI advice systems, a leading expert in digital justice said this week. In a report for the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, Dr Natalie Byrom - whose 2019 report on digital justice kicked off HM Courts & Tribunals Service's data strategy - also cautions against embedding overseas-developed proprietary software in the courts system.
Delegated by Default? published in the week that AI champion Sir Colin Birss was sworn in as master of the rolls, claims that the ‘MoJ, HMCTS and the senior judiciary are increasingly delegating the delivery of digital justice and AI mediated services to the market’. It recommends that the MoJ and HMCTS assess vendor lock-in and risks to sovereignty before implementing systems.
Byrom calls on the MoJ to reduce dependence on 'a small number of foreign AI developers', in favour of ’open and interoperable infrastructure’. The UK government should also scale up in-house capability. While turning to the market was an 'understandable consequence' of the failure of the HMCTS courts reform programme to achieve its aims, the ecosystem of AI regulation and governance is wholly inadequate to support it, she states.
The Microsoft Copilot AI system chosen for the judiciary creates particular challenges for evaluation, transparency and accountability, Byrom states.
The consequences are particularly acute in the family justice system, for which few high quality AI advice systems have been produced. The 'ecosystem tracker' published by the MoJ-funded LawtechUK programme lists only eight companies providing services in family law, of which only one 'could plausibly be described as providing pre-court online dispute resolution services'.
However initiatives to develop authoritative support systems are undermined by the superficial attractiveness of free generative AI tools such as Google's AI Overview. The report cites research suggesting that generative AI searches are less likely than conventional search engines to lead users to official sources.
Gen AI advice is prone to both inaccuracy and sycophancy - tools are designed to tell users what they want to hear. This has led to the rise of so-called 'vibe lawyering' encouraging people to litigate by overstating their chances of winning. In family justice the implications of unrepresented parties turning to tools expressly designed to tell them what they want to hear are particularly alarming. Research suggests that participants who interact with sycophantic AI become more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships.
Sycophantic AI tools 'may affirm and enflame vexatious litigants and domestic abusers, while simultaneously increasing their ability to produce superficially convincing documents at scale', the report states. Family courts 'must rapidly develop the capacity to distinguish weaponised litigation from genuiine "high conflict" cases.'
Byrom also recommends that any review of legal services regulation should consider how domestic AI-facilitated tools can be regulated through registration rather than by making legal advice a reserved activity. She concludes that: 'The report is not an argument against digital or AI-mediated justice, or against private-sector involvement. Instead, it argues that the current model of "delegation by default" is a policy choice and should be replaced with a deliberate approach based on publicly governed standards for safety, performance and evidence.'
1 Reader's comment