An artificial intelligence (AI) program to assist with drafting court rulings, jointly developed by the Judicial Yuan and Chunghwa Telecom (中華電信), would begin a trial run as soon as late next month, after preliminary reviews, sources said yesterday.
Overtime at courts was common due to a great deal of paperwork that has to be processed, which prompted increased efforts to digitize court processes, from allowing remote court attendance to developing AI programs to decrease clerks’ workloads, the Judicial Yuan said.
Criminal court judges had to process 56.1 cases per month in 2013, which had risen to 59.67 per month last year, the source said on condition of anonymity.
Photo: Wu Cheng-feng, Taipei Times
One-quarter of them were driving under the influence (DUI) cases, the source said.
The AI program uses the MT5 large language model, the source said.
It was fed rulings, precedents and legal terminology from rulings from 1996 to 2021, and was trained to produce legal documents in the format used in Taiwan, they said.
Judges had been happy with the preliminary results, they added.
The system is to assist the courts by generating ruling notices for DUI cases, or aiding and abetting in fraud cases, as they are considered single-offense cases, the source said.
A judge would specify whether a defendant was found guilty or not guilty, whether they confessed or denied the charges, legal acts applicable to the case, whether corpus delicti — the principle that no one should be convicted of a crime without sufficient evidence that the crime actually occurred — is met, and select the option for the AI to proceed with a draft, which would include citation of procedural law or legal articles, the source said.
The output would include the opening, the body of the ruling, the verdict, the facts, the reasons for the ruling and the legal citations, they said.
The program is to take precedence into account to gauge the sentence, the source said.
A judge would review the draft and, if satisfied, could immediately enter it into the system as the ruling, greatly decreasing the time spent on draft writing, they said.
The Judicial Yuan on Tuesday is to select the courts at which the system is to be trialed, the source added.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has