Courts on AI / The court's own use of AI

Ross v. United States

District of Columbia Court of Appeals · State appellate courts · DC · 2025-02-20 · No. 23-CM-1067 · opinion

The court's own use of AIcourt used AIChatGPT

On 2025-02-20, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reverses an animal-cruelty conviction for insufficient proof. The majority and dissent both discuss ChatGPT responses: the majority questions its value as a proxy for common knowledge, while the dissent uses it as a limited check in nonprecedential reasoning.

Disposition: The court reversed Ross’s conviction and remanded for judgment of acquittal; a majority footnote and dissent disclosed ChatGPT queries.

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

We, like the dissent, harbor doubts about whether ChatGPT is “a good proxy for what is, and what isn’t, common knowledge.” Post at 37 n.4. But to the extent the dissent relies on ChatGPT’s degree of certainty as to whether leaving a dog in a hot car is harmful, we note that ChatGPT expresses similar certainty in its response to the query, “How much would a pretty clean, operable 2002 Dodge Intrepid with no significant dents or scratches have been worth in 2012?” ... Note that $3,000 (ChatGPT’s minimum price) is significantly above the $1,000 threshold at issue in Long. ChatGPT’s analysis, therefore, does not correspond to at least one of our sufficiency decisions. ... I do not mean to suggest that ChatGPT is a good proxy for what is, and isn’t, common knowledge—it is definitely not. It can answer questions that are far from common knowledge. For instance, when I asked it what the forty-first element in the periodic table is, it responded (apparently correctly) with Niobium (Nb). But it is at least a point in favor of something being common knowledge that it is, in fact, true; and it is a far stronger point against it if it’s not. Also, when I had each of my three law clerks run this same inquiry, ChatGPT gave each of them a slightly different but substantively similar answer, all beginning with an unequivocal “Yes.”

Authorities cited in the passage: Snell v. United Specialty Ins. Co., 102 F.4th 1208 (11th Cir. 2024) · Long v. United States

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