The Georgia Supreme Court is taking proactive steps to manage the rapidly expanding influence of artificial intelligence within the state’s judicial system, announcing a comprehensive three-year plan to address the integration and potential misuse of AI technologies.

What began as seemingly innocuous uses, such as students leveraging AI for writing assignments, has escalated into a “palpable threat” to the justice system. In the five years since OpenAI unleashed Chat GPT-3 on the public, the technology has seen creative, and sometimes ill-advised, applications, including instances of attorneys using it to generate briefs with fabricated legal citations.

Recognizing these escalating risks, the state’s high court initiated a 10-month review in August and released its new recommendations on Thursday. The proposed three-year process aims to strategically adapt Georgia’s courts to the evolving AI landscape.

The initiative will commence with establishing clear leadership and governance structures, culminating in the implementation of new policies and processes for all courts across Georgia. Key phases along the way will include community engagement, thorough process reviews, targeted education and training programs, and the development of robust business and technology architectures.

The committee behind the new report, titled “Artificial Intelligence and Georgia’s Courts,” was chaired by Justice Andrew A. Pinson. Its findings incorporate observations and concerns raised by the State Bar of Georgia’s Board of Governors, which had issued its own report on AI risks in early June.

The Bar’s report emphasized that revisions to a rule of conduct for lawyers were “particularly critical,” focusing on the importance of attorneys’ competence and proficiency with emerging technologies. “It is the committee’s assessment GenAI tools will in short order become ubiquitous,” the Bar report’s authors underscored.

Justice Pinson’s committee cited numerous examples of AI uses that emerged during their 10-month review period alone, illustrating the technology’s rapid integration across the legal sphere. These included the Indiana Supreme Court’s adoption of AI for voice-to-text transcriptions, the Arizona Supreme Court’s use of AI avatars to deliver news about judicial rulings, and a concerning instance where a family deployed AI to create a victim impact statement from their deceased relative during a trial’s sentencing phase.

“A key challenge the committee faced during its work is the rapidly evolving nature of a technology new to courts and organizations across the country,” Justice Pinson’s committee concluded in its report.

The panel provided a preliminary categorization of AI uses, distinguishing between acceptable applications like legal research and scheduling; unacceptable uses such as jury selection and “black box” sentencing algorithms; and potential uses that require further study and testing, including language translation and advanced sentencing and risk assessments.