It’s already happened about a year and a half since ChatGPT started making headlines and attract users. From the beginning (in fact, this was our first publication about the tool), we have always appreciated everything positive about the tool, but we remember that it is by no means an infallible tool. In this article we focused on three types of basic problems, and in this special we will delve into the biggest of them, hallucinations.

Over time (relatively short, actually) we have seen more than remarkable developments making ChatGPT more reliable, which has increased significantly with the introduction of GPT-4o and with it the arrival of online mode in free accounts. These improvements are substantial, that’s for sure, but that shouldn’t make us think that this is now a 100% reliable tool. Mistakes, biases, lack of resources and hallucinations still exist.

If we take it into the specific context of the judicial world, we find the heads and tails of the coin. We saw the face early last year when a Colombian court promoted the use of ChatGPT in an investigation related to a trial. The cross came to us from the United States, where a lawyer inadvertently used false information generated by a chatbot. A mistake that cost him many explanations and even threatened his professional career.

It is because of this, because of these precedents, that I find these reports interesting and disturbing at the same time. And according to Reuters Brazil is set to integrate ChatGPT’s core technology into its judicial system. However, it will do so with a customized implementation independent of the person responsible for providing the general purpose chatbot service. Something logical, of course, because we can imagine a huge amount of information with some type of protection going through this implementation.

According to those responsible, the goal of this implementation is speed up judicial processes in the country of Rio, a goal that is undoubtedly always desirable. It is further suggested that all information obtained be subsequently checked and that this measure does not result in a reduction in the number of employees in the judicial system. However, and although it looks positive on paper, no one is aware that certain combinations such as hallucination plus human error can lead to potentially dangerous situations. And since we’re talking about the judicial system, with all that that entails, we should start crossing our fingers now that nothing goes wrong.