{"id":8999,"date":"2026-02-22T11:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T11:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/woman-apologizes-ai-burning-house\/"},"modified":"2026-02-22T11:45:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T11:45:00","slug":"woman-apologizes-ai-burning-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/woman-apologizes-ai-burning-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Woman Uses AI to Apologize for Burning Down House, Biting Cop"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The point of making an apology is that it should be sincere. It also helps if you put some actual effort into making it.<\/p>\n

A judge in New Zealand is being forced to mull over these criteria after receiving a written apology from a defendant that appears to be generated with \u2014 and why else would we be talking about it on this website \u2014 an AI model.<\/p>\n

The defendant had a lot to answer for: she pleaded guilty to arson and other charges after burning down a house. She also bit a police officer while in custody, after which she apparently \u201ctook delight\u201d in telling the cop that she had AIDS, The New Zealand Herald <\/em>first reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When it came time for sentencing, the judge, Tom Gilbert of the district court in Christchurch, confronted the defendant about the apology letters she sent, one to the judge and one for the victims.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe issue of remorse is interesting,\u201d Gilbert said according to a transcript viewed by the New York Times<\/em><\/a>. \u201cOut of curiosity I punched into two AI tools \u2018draft me a letter for a judge expressing remorse for my offending,’\u201d he continued. \u201cIt became immediately apparent that these were two AI-generated letters, albeit with tweaks around the edges.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remorse is a factor in sentencing. If you seem genuinely sorry about your actions, you can get a reduced sentence. And the judge wasn\u2019t against the use of AI itself, he clarified.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut certainly when one is considering the genuineness of an individual\u2019s remorse, simply producing a computer-generated letter does not really take me anywhere as far as I am concerned,\u201d Gilbert added.<\/p>\n

In the end, he decided to reduce her sentence by five percent, instead of the ten percent reduction her lawyer was asking for. She will now serve 27 months in prison. \u201cI do not consider this is a case where 10 percent is justified and, indeed, 5 percent might be viewed as reasonably generous,\u201d Gilbert said.<\/p>\n

AI\u2019s role in the courtroom continues to be a fount of screwups and controversies. Lawyers have been admonished by judges<\/a> after they were caught using AI tools that left hallucinated passages in official filings, including botched citations and made-up case law. These kinds of incidents have incited mini-crises<\/a> at multiple law firms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t even the first apology-related AI courtroom blunder. Last October, after getting caught using a hallucinating AI in court filings, a defense lawyer submitted a brief explaining his AI usage that was also<\/em> written with AI<\/a> \u2014 something he denied at first, later apologized for, and then backtracked on admitting using. If there\u2019s a lesson to be learned here, it\u2019s that judges have long wised up to the proliferation of lazy AI tech.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> Law Firm Sacks Hundreds of Employees Amid Pivot to AI<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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The post Woman Uses AI to Apologize for Burning Down House, Biting Cop<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The point of making an apology is that it should be sincere. It also helps if you put some actual effort into making it. A judge in New Zealand is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}