China has created an AI prosecutor who can bring real charges against people

The Shanghai Pudong District Prosecutor’s Office has started testing a new artificial intelligence system on real court cases, which should formulate charges against criminals. In fact, she replaces the prosecutor, but in a limited range of legal cases, and has no right to file formal charges. But the accuracy of the AI prosecutor is unprecedented – 97% of the charges are correct.

The basis for the electronic prosecutor was the existing “System 206– – an expert forensic tool for analyzing evidence and identifying the composition of crimes. The “206 system” works very accurately and helps to rank crimes by severity in order to determine how dangerous a suspect is to society. But this is not a full-fledged AI – in particular, for its operation, all data must be translated into a format understandable to the machine.

The new AI, on the contrary, understands human speech, verbal turns, is able to search and filter information. He was trained to identify the eight most frequent crimes in this region. These are theft, credit card fraud, premeditated assault, gambling, resisting the police, reckless driving, fraud and – especially – political dissent. The only unsolved problem is who will be responsible in case of an AI error? While there is no clear position, AI is in no hurry to entrust official work and is not allowed to formulate accusations, but no one prevents it from accumulating experience on real tasks.