Zimbabwe News Update
zimsphere
4 min read
Just a few years ago, it was not conceivable that Artificial Intelligence (AI) would command so much dominance over our lives as it does now. The ubiquity of AI use (in particular, generative AI) in almost all facets of daily life, across many professions/disciplines, has taken the world by storm. Basically, no profession has been left untouched by the gigantic influence of AI, which has massively revolutionized how we approach and interact with work. It goes without saying that this has also come with a litany of advantages and disadvantages. The desirable and the undesirable. The legal sector has not been spared in this. And recent events in Zimbabwe’s legal spaces show just how easily technology can outpace our caution and our professional judgment.
There was shock in Zimbabwe’s legal realm when it emerged a few months ago that Professor Welshman Ncube had filed legal submissions to the Supreme Court generated with the assistance of AI – in which 12 fictitious judgments were cited in heads of argument that have since been declared as defective and null.
At the time, Prof Ncube was quick to proffer a sincere apology to the Supreme Court, in which he acknowledged the grave error, saying that this emanated from a graduate researcher whose AI-generated research work was not verified. (We covered the storyhere.) Just last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the AI-generated legal arguments submitted by Prof Ncube areinvalidand must be treated as a nullity, after the opposing counsel had challenged the submissions (rightly so).
Read the full article
