If I was killed in something as pointless as a road range incident and then an AI trained on me was wheeled into court to "forgive" my aggressor I'd be incensed from beyond the astral plane.
For sure, but the perpetrator received the maximum sentence possibly due to the emotional freight delivered by the AI message.
Who knows whether the convicted feels absolved by the AI forgiveness? However he feels, he received the harshest penalty he could have received (10 years).
It will stipulate that if my family does this with my likeness, they must:
1) key in a slowly gyrating field of lines as the background
2) occasionally add a cd-skipping effect, and occasionally garble the pitch
I'll be gone, so it won't make a difference, but it cracks me up to think of a solemn courtroom suddenly watching Thom Headroom give an impact statement.
dredmorbius•9mo ago
From the original source, statement of a judge identified as "chief justice Timmer" statement:
AI has the potential to create great efficiencies in the justice system and may assist those unschooled in the law to better present their positions. For that reason, we are excited about AI’s potential. But AI can also hinder or even upend justice if inappropriately used. A measured approach is best. Along those lines, the court has formed an AI committee to examine AI use and make recommendations for how best to use it. At bottom, those who use AI—including courts—are responsible for its accuracy.
<https://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/chandler/...>
I'm presuming that this is Ann A. Scott Timmer, chief justice of the Arizona state supreme court:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Timmer>
christophilus•9mo ago
treetalker•9mo ago
The judge at trial, according to the posted article, was a Todd Lang:
> Judge Todd Lang responded positively to the AI usage.
I don't know Arizona law, but I would think that the defendant should and would get a resentencing if he challenged this on appeal.
kotaKat•9mo ago
Guaranteed this is going to be a spicy appeal if it happens.
dredmorbius•9mo ago
[L]ast month, artificial intelligence brought [Christopher Pelkey] back to life during his killer’s sentencing hearing.... Pelkey’s sister and brother-in-law used the technology to recreate his image and voice likeness to “talk” to the courtroom about his life and the day he met Gabriel Paul Horcasitas, who shot him during a confrontation near Gilbert and Germann roads.
<https://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/chandler/...>
AFAIU sentencing is performed by the judge, not jury. It's still wildly divergent court practice.
dredmorbius•9mo ago
The relationship of Judge Timmer's statement to the proceedings in which the AI fabulation was presented are less than clear, and I suspect that ABC 15/Arizona's article, by Jordan Bontke and Ashley Loose, suffers from some poor composition or editing. The reference to Timmer sounds as if there should have been a prior mention of her, though there isn't (I've checked this several times).
And your comment that an S.C. justice would comment on a case that's only just been decided, and not yet appealed (IMO it should be, based on this evidence/testimony alone, and regardless of other merits), is also bizarre.
Given that the AI testimony was given at sentencing, an obvious remedy would be to retain the initial jury verdict and re-do the sentencing with a different judge.
treetalker•9mo ago
Not sure why you think my comment is bizarre: I'm saying that it would be extremely unusual and disqualifying for an appellate judge to comment on a case that could be appealed, and therefore I suspect that the appellate judge (Timmer) probably made that statement in a context unrelated to the case. Unless I misunderstand, I think we're on the same page about that.
> IMO it should be …
Not as legal advice but as personal opinion, and based only on the information in the article, I agree and think that appealing would be a no-brainer.
The remedy you suggest would be what I would expect and what I would ask for, but I'm not sure how Arizona does things. It's possible that a new sentencing might be conducted with the same judge.
dredmorbius•9mo ago
We agree.
My argument for resentencing by a different judge is that the emotional impact of AI testimony is so strong as to be impossible to ignore, and hence disqualifying from judgement anyone exposed to it. It's one thing to say "disregard the evidence / testimony", it's quite another to exclude the evidence entirely.
alphan0n•9mo ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_impact_statement
nitwit005•9mo ago
alphan0n•9mo ago
dredmorbius•9mo ago
And not, as nitwit005 aptly puts it, speaking through a puppet.
alphan0n•9mo ago
They did make it in their own names, there was never any implication that it wasn’t.