Artificial Intelligence and Sentencing: Humans against Machines

Abstract

According to Chiao in his contribution to this book, the desirability of the use of AI in sentencing should be evaluated by comparing computers to the status quo ante, rather than to an unrealistic, and in any case unrealized, ideal. Although we agree that changes to the legal process such as adopting algorithmic sentencing methods can be beneficial when the change is an incremental improvement over the status quo, in order to assess whether the change is an improvement, we need to know what this “ideal” is toward which improvements are aimed. Therefore, the question whether AI is better at making sentencing decisions than human judges is approached differently in this chapter. We compare human with AI judges by evaluating the extent to which they are able to make a legitimate sentencing decision: Is legitimacy better achieved by machine than by human judges?