Legal Minds, Algorithmic Decisions: How LLMs Apply Constitutional Principles in Complex Scenarios
This highlights potential biases in LLMs for legal decision-making, which is important for policymakers and legal professionals deploying such systems.
The paper analyzes how GPT-4 interprets constitutional principles in complex bioethics scenarios from the Italian Constitutional Court, finding that it consistently aligns more closely with progressive interpretations and mirrors applicants' views, overlooking competing values.
In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of how large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, interpret constitutional principles in complex decision-making scenarios. We examine rulings from the Italian Constitutional Court on bioethics issues that involve trade-offs between competing values and compare model-generated legal arguments on these issues to those presented by the State, the Court, and the applicants. Our results indicate that GPT-4 consistently aligns more closely with progressive interpretations of the Constitution, often overlooking competing values and mirroring the applicants' views rather than the more conservative perspectives of the State or the Court's moderate positions. Our experiments reveal a distinct tendency of GPT-4 to favor progressive legal interpretations, underscoring the influence of underlying data biases. We thus underscore the importance of testing alignment in real-world scenarios and considering the implications of deploying LLMs in decision-making processes.