With the rapid spread of generative AI or artificial intelligence, it has been found that lawyers for perpetrators of sexual offenses have used generative AI in some cases to create apologies to victims.
Anyone can easily create a sentence if they use the system. A lawyer says that his aim was to make a polite apology, but experts working in support of crime victims question whether this will lead to remorse on the part of the victim and whether the victim will accept that the perpetrator is truly remorseful.
The apology was prepared by a male lawyer in Kansai region. He was appointed as a defense lawyer for a man accused by the police of a sex crime and used Chat GPT this winter.
When the man was initially asked to write an apology, there was only one sentence that he was sorry for stepping on her heart. He said “I thought he felt remorse, but wasn’t good at writing, and it wasn’t something I could give to the victim.” He believed that the only way to do this was to draft a statement by himself, he used Chat GPT, which he had been seeking to utilize for some time, to “write the apology that a sex offender should submit”. The result was “more substantial”, he thought, than the apology written by the man.
He repeatedly prompted “be more polite” and “include improvement measures”, and included words of remorse that he had heard from the man while taking the victim’s feelings into consideration. It took dozens of minutes to prepare the text, which was entirely handwritten by the man.
The apology was submitted to the victim in order to seek extenuating circumstances in the criminal proceedings. The prosecutor and the victim haven’t been informed of the use of Chat GPT in the apology.
The lawyer said, “I don’t tell them because I don’t think it’s a particular problem. It’s an important job of the defense lawyer to put his remorse in writing well, and the use of Chat GPT is just streamlining that job” and that he would use it in the future if he had the opportunity to do so.”
In response, Masahiro Okumura (Osaka Bar Association), a lawyer involved in supporting victims of crime, said, “Victims want the perpetrator to show true remorse, and a letter of apology is one opportunity to confirm this. If the letter is made by an AI, it won’t lead to reflection on the part of the perpetrator, and the victim won’t recognize it as genuine remorse. If the victim learns that the apology was made by an AI, he or she will be hurt and may even suffer secondary damage.
