The Public Prosecutor replaced by Artificial Intelligence. A step forward?

In China, technicians have programmed artificial intelligence to identify crimes and press charges "with 97% accuracy", as officially stated, in a march towards "Artificial Justice" that began years ago.

According to the South China Morning Post , researchers have developed a tool that can evaluate cases and suggest criminal convictions based on a verbal description, based on 1,000 reported “Features” from around 17,000 real cases from 2015 to 2020.

The "Lex ex machina" has already been tested by China's largest district attorney, the Shanghai Pudong People's Procuratorate, and has proven to be particularly adept at China's most common criminal acts, such as gambling, dangerous driving, theft and fraud. They hope it will soon come to recognize more complex cases, such as major frauds or murders. The PMs are served.

" The system can replace prosecutors in decision-making to some extent ," said Professor Shi Yong, who led the study, in a statement published by Management Review magazine.

The use of artificial intelligence in law enforcement has long been criticized by political activists and engineers, who argue that existing technology isn't always nuanced enough to do it justice, a field that humans themselves have yet to master. Several studies have shown the inability of AI to detect hate speech online or a preference for white faces on the screen: at the same time, we are talking about small crimes that are relatively easier to define and judge.

Despite its apparent weaknesses, machine learning is already being enforced in court. Earlier this year, an Associated Press investigation followed an Oklahoma man accused of killing a neighbor based on a blacked-out surveillance video and a proprietary algorithm called ShotSpotter which, by analyzing the noises contained in the footage, he was able to identify the shooter. In this case, however, it is a technology that does not replace the accusation, but integrates it. China has taken a further, and complex, step forward.

If the prosecution is mandatory, the AI ​​could be of help, especially to eliminate certain bad habits of PMs who underestimate small crimes, very disruptive to ordinary life, to focus on the cases to which they are most sensitive, even politically. At the same time there is a basic problem: who controls the controllers?

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The article The Public Prosecutor replaced by Artificial Intelligence. A step forward? comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-pubblico-ministero-sostituito-dallintelligenza-artificiale-un-passo-avanti/ on Wed, 29 Dec 2021 09:00:11 +0000.