The prompt that appeared in a Court of Appeals ruling

This week a ruling from the Ninth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals made the rounds with something pasted at the end: the instructions given to an artificial intelligence assistant. “You are a judge of the Court of Appeals who must draft the reasoning section of the ruling…”. The chamber corrected the document the next day and asked its clerk for a report. Here is my reading, in short.

That a court file shows the instructions given to an AI assistant confirms something the data already shows: AI is now a widespread technology in the legal world. Globally, 44% of judicial operators across 96 countries already use these tools in their work (UNESCO, 2024). In Chile, a survey of civil judges (Lillo, Cantillana and Sanhueza, an ANID project) shows that one in ten says they use it in their judicial work, while half have never received any training in technology. That is good news for courts with an ever-growing workload. But AI does not replace the lawyer, whether in-house, litigator or judge: it makes tasks faster, and responsibility for legal judgment stays with the person.

What this case puts up for debate is not the quality of the decision but the method. Copying and pasting from a generic assistant, without cleaning up or checking, is exactly what the current rules try to prevent. Article 17 of the Supreme Court’s Code of Judicial Ethics states that the judicial decision “is always a human task and its responsibility cannot be delegated”, and requires independently verifying any answer or citation that comes out of these systems. The Judicial Academy’s guide on artificial intelligence also asks judges to record what role the tool played and never to enter the parties’ data into prompts. The Chilean Bar Association’s guide, from July 2026, requires lawyers to keep control of the matter and personal responsibility for what they sign. The lesson is to favor specialized tools and, above all, training. More than mastering the software of the moment, a lawyer needs the judgment to know what to delegate to the machine and what not to.