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By using artificial intelligence to turn his favourite poem into lyrics in the style of Taylor Swift and Nick Cave, Chief Justice Peter Quinlan identified that the missing qualia – the raw experience of conscious experiences – could be what turns law into something “inhuman”.
Source: Minds Count
In a speech delivered at the 20th Minds Count Annual Lecture earlier this month, Western Australia’s Chief Justice Peter Quinlan opened up about a fear that has kept him up at night: that, one day, generative artificial intelligence could produce more predictable, equally learned, and fairer outcomes than human judges ever could.
It is a fear he shares with the Federal Court of Australia’s Chief Justice Stephen Gageler, who told the Japanese judiciary at the Supreme Court of Tokyo that AI was “artificial reasoning on stilts”.
It is not so much that AI could replace legal jobs – with Chief Justice Quinlan predicting that, even if that were so, he would probably have reached the retirement age by then – or that “something real will have been lost along the way” as the process transitions to machines.
“Is it the fear that, if we allow this to happen – if we hand over judgment to the faster, more predictable determinations of artificial intelligence – there will come a point, and it may not take long, that by decoupling the product of our system of law from the qualia and the intersubjectivity that created and sustained it, that the law will become unrecognisable to us. That it will become inhumane,” he said.
Chief Justice Quinlan said what the world would be left with was, as American writer and Professor David Foster Wallace put it, “the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing”.
In his speech, titled “What the Machine Doesn’t Know: Humanity, Artificial Intelligence and the Law”, Chief Justice Quinlan spoke about the philosophical concept of qualia, a word used to describe the subject experience of “things we all have”. It is a “fundamental” part of being a conscious being, “and of being a human being”.
A common example is the experience of seeing something that is red, and also describes the quality of emotions upon seeing the colour. It is best felt through art and poetry, Chief Justice Quinlan explained.
Although artificial intelligence’s mastery of language should not be downplayed – and particularly its ability to speak to the qualia of experiences – Chief Justice Quinlan stressed that the machines do not know what it is to have experienced the qualia sensation.
To demonstrate this, Chief Justice Quinlan took the audience to the poem “Spring and Fall” by Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, which starts with a young girl crying over leaves and ends with the realisation that what she is actually sad about is mortality.
Chief Justice Quinlan used Claude – his “current preferred AI program” – to turn the poem into a Taylor Swift song. What he got back was a “remarkable achievement”; one which used Cardigan and 3am references to capture the qualia of our awareness of mortality.
He then asked Claude to rewrite the poem in the style of Nick Cave, the frontman for Australian band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
What it came back with was a song that referenced the young death of Cave’s son, Arthur, which has permeated “much of his art since”. If not for Claude being a computer program, Chief Justice Quinlan said this particular reference “would border on offensive”.
“Why might that be? It is, can I suggest, because we know that Claude is appropriating Nick Cave’s experience, the unique qualia attached to a very personal tragedy, and it is doing so with absolutely no sense of what personal tragedy feels like,” Chief Justice Quinlan said.
Artificial intelligence may manipulate language, subjectivity, and qualia, but it is “detached from what creates and sustains that language”. Even if it were to one day develop consciousness, “it would still not be the qualia of what it is to be human”.
“If these remarks have meant anything to you, it is that we should trust qualia. And that we should respond to that fear, ’uprightly, deliberately and resolutely’ to ensure that, whatever benefits AI will bring, and no doubt there will be many, we strive to find ways to ensure the law is, and remains, essentially human,” Chief Justice Quinlan said.
In a comment to Lawyers Weekly after the lecture, Minds Count’s acting chair and Canon’s director of people and sustainability, David Field, said: “We were delighted to have such a strong turn-out for the lecture and, based on the conversations afterwards, I think everyone I spoke to agree the evening gave them new insights on a topic of critical relevance to the legal profession.”
“For me, as someone who has been practising as a lawyer for more than 30 years, it was remarkable to be gaining new perspectives on how judges themselves think about things like the role of objectivity and subjectivity in judgments.”
