The point of making an apology is that it should be sincere. It also helps if you put some actual effort into making it.
A judge in New Zealand is being forced to mull over these criteria after receiving a written apology from a defendant that appears to be generated with — and why else would we be talking about it on this website — an AI model.
The defendant had a lot to answer for: she pleaded guilty to arson and other charges after burning down a house. She also bit a police officer while in custody, after which she apparently “took delight” in telling the cop that she had AIDS, The New Zealand Herald first reported.
When it came time for sentencing, the judge, Tom Gilbert of the district court in Christchurch, confronted the defendant about the apology letters she sent, one to the judge and one for the victims.
“The issue of remorse is interesting,” Gilbert said according to a transcript viewed by the New York Times. “Out of curiosity I punched into two AI tools ‘draft me a letter for a judge expressing remorse for my offending,’” he continued. “It became immediately apparent that these were two AI-generated letters, albeit with tweaks around the edges.”
Remorse is a factor in sentencing. If you seem genuinely sorry about your actions, you can get a reduced sentence. And the judge wasn’t against the use of AI itself, he clarified.
“But certainly when one is considering the genuineness of an individual’s remorse, simply producing a computer-generated letter does not really take me anywhere as far as I am concerned,” Gilbert added.
In the end, he decided to reduce her sentence by five percent, instead of the ten percent reduction her lawyer was asking for. She will now serve 27 months in prison. “I do not consider this is a case where 10 percent is justified and, indeed, 5 percent might be viewed as reasonably generous,” Gilbert said.
AI’s role in the courtroom continues to be a fount of screwups and controversies. Lawyers have been admonished by judges after they were caught using AI tools that left hallucinated passages in official filings, including botched citations and made-up case law. These kinds of incidents have incited mini-crises at multiple law firms.
This isn’t even the first apology-related AI courtroom blunder. Last October, after getting caught using a hallucinating AI in court filings, a defense lawyer submitted a brief explaining his AI usage that was also written with AI — something he denied at first, later apologized for, and then backtracked on admitting using. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that judges have long wised up to the proliferation of lazy AI tech.
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