Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1546781
3 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 SEPTEMBER 2026 NEWS pains in the Maltese courts bly refers to ChatGPT," the magistrate wrote, saying that when the term was used on 24 July 2014, "the world had not yet dreamed of it". She added that Magro would have been better off relying on his "sacro- sanct right to silence", since his "forced explanation" had begun to "bury the credibility of his testimony". AI as the bench's research assistant Artificial intelligence has not always featured as the villain. In fact, our bench has turned to it as a research tool on several occasions. Last April, when self-styled ex-gay Matthew Grech and the two PM news co-hosts were acquitted of the charge of advertising gay conversion therapy, Magistrate Monica Vella's footnotes cite a Microsoft Copilot URL as a re- search source for working out how the conversion therapy is regulated across different jurisdictions. Other judges prefer Gemini. Last February, when deciding on the compensation that should be given to the owners of a Balluta apartment un- der Malta's old rent-control laws re- gime, Judge Giovanni Grixti referred to GeminiAI to obtain 1987 rental fig- ures. In a footnote, Gemini, citing the Na- tional Statistics Office, the National Minimum Wage National Standard Order, and reports by MaltaToday and The Malta Independent, duly turned up the fact that in in 1987, the min- imum wage was €69.60 a week, or €3,617 annually. The estimated rental value of the property stood at €12,379. The court, working through the fig- ures, wondered aloud how realistic it really was for a landlord to have charged "four times the annual mini- mum wage of a Maltese worker" for the property. Noting that the average home back then cost a mere €55,000, the judge knocked back a further 10% off the compensation to account for the dis- crepancy, bringing the final figure to €53,114. Before the chatbot era The term "artificial intelligence" has not cropped up that extensively before the Maltese courts, unlike its interna- tional counterparts, where it's increas- ingly becoming a headache. The earliest reference for artificial intelligence identified for this article predates AI as we know it today by well over a decade. In 2010, a Court of Su- perior Appeal dealt with a navigation system that was described as using "ar- tificial intelligence" in an intellectual property tussle. By this, the court meant nothing more exotic than its ability to respond to user input. It was, in other words, a very different kind of artificial intelligence from the technology now appearing in court- rooms. AI generated pornography Not every case makes for light read- ing. In a 2025 judgment, the court dealt with an AI-generated pornographic image purported to depict a child un- der nine years of age. The accused, who received a proba- tion order, explained that the original photograph—taken from Facebook— showed a person who was not a minor, and that the AI generated image, which was of a non-sexual nature, had been produced "just out of curiosity". Having personally examined the ma- terial, the court concluded that while it warranted punishment, it fell short of the threshold for imprisonment. The case, decided a year ago, leaves the legislator with some homework to do: How ought the criminal law treat imagery that never involved a real pho- tograph of a real child, once artificial intelligence is doing the generating? ChatGPT also managed to cause a stir at the Maksar trial last year. A reserve juror was found to have smuggled in a tablet, which he had been using, by his own account, "to see about the situa- tion of the trial". He was fined €1,000 and removed from jury duty; the trial itself carried on regardless. Which brings us to the irony of it all. Malta is, after all, encouraging its cit- izens to get chatty with chatbots. Back in May, Malta became the first in the world to hand out free year-long sub- scriptions to ChatGPT Plus or Micro- soft Copilot to any citizen who com- pletes its AI For All course. This scheme is championed by Econ- omy Ministry led by Silvio Schembri, in partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft and the University of Malta. The technology, in other words, is being ushered into everyday Maltese life at precisely the moment our leg- islators, law enforcers, judges, magis- trates and lawyers are still working out where, if anywhere, it belongs within the legal system. In dubio pro reo AI, when it isn't off hallucinating, simply does as it's told, and has no stake in misleading a court. But it's worth asking what it actually means for a machine to be asked anything at all— even granting it, for argument's sake, something resembling thought. What- ever it's doing up there, it cannot, in any meaningful sense, doubt. René Descartes's famous cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) tends to get rather remembered as starting with thought. But as Anne Carson recently reminded us, it started with doubt. Descartes set about stripping away every belief that could conceivably be questioned—his senses, the physical world, even mathematics itself—until the only thing left standing was the fact that someone was doing the question- ing. Thinking only got him to existence because doubting got him there first, which is presumably why the fuller, later gloss on his logic runs dubito, er- go cogito, ergo sum (I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am). A hallucinating chatbot never doubts. It doesn't hesitate over a fabricated case citation and wonder, 'hang on, is this right?'. In a criminal courtroom, a lot is built on beyond reasonable doubt. And it is probably why a courtroom is the most dangerous place for AI to hallucinate— research tool or not. While AI does some of the thinking, but none of the doubting, the people doing the asking can remain very much on the hook for what gets submitted, said, and done in their name— doubt included. Perhaps the time is ripe for us to start working out what responsibility looks like on that front. its international counterparts, where it's increasingly becoming a headache