How AI can assist social science and legal research

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to generate court transcripts for social science and legal research purposes, but caution needs to be exercised, the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council has found.

The Council’s latest paper, Evaluating AI transcription of court proceedings for use in social science and legal research, examined the accuracy of AI-generated transcripts and whether they are a feasible, cost-effective way to compile transcripts for research purposes.

Council chair Kerry O’Brien said the research found AI-generated transcripts could be useful as a research workflow tool but should not be used as a replacement for verified transcripts.

“The technology is changing rapidly, and it is important we know how the tools can be used but also where their limits lie,” Mr O’Brien said.

“AI-generated transcripts allow those conducting social science and legal research to easily skim and categorise particular cases, decreasing the time and resources which would usually be needed.

“However, we know errors can happen, so human involvement is important and audio should be retained for verification purposes.”

This research, released in October, was conducted while investigating the outcomes of contravention of domestic violence orders for the Council’s report The Tangled Web: Examining domestic and family violence sentencing reforms.

Read the research here.