With AI, Supreme Court is seen as well as heard

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With public approval of the United States Supreme Court hovering at historic lows, and with questions about how the Judicial Branch of federal government operates, many Americans feel disconnected from what the court does. A new online AI tool called On the Docket aims to change that.

Timothy Johnson, professor of political science and law at the University of Minnesota, has been studying the U.S. Supreme Court for over 30 years. He has always been interested in oral arguments, and has spent much of his career studying them. Through that, he has gotten to work with Jerry Goldman, who developed the Oyez Project, an unofficial online multimedia archive website for the court. Johnson and Goldman worked together to finish that website and ensure that all of the audio of the oral arguments was transcribed so that it could be read as well as heard.

“Jerry and I have this shared desire, and a shared belief, that the courts should be opened up publicly in ways that it simply has not been,” Johnson said. “You can go on C-SPAN and see the Congress, you can see the president on streaming services or on TV anytime a president wants to speak to the public. But the justices, by and large, do their work in secret.”

Only two parts of the decision-making process are open to the public: oral arguments and opinion announcements. Since COVID, oral arguments have been more public, because they have been livestreamed. However, opinion announcements are not livestreamed. Audio for these is only released to the National Archives after the Court’s term ends. For this reason, the public has limited access or interest. Additionally, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, according to Johnson, are much more likely to watch videos than to read or to listen to audio.

“The impetus for this was, once AI became good enough, if you will, to be able to produce high-quality video, we really started to take that next step of wedding authentic audio, which are the court’s opinion announcements, with AI-generated videos to put citizens in the Supreme Court so they can hear and see opinion announcements,” Johnson said.

To make the AI video, creators used the most recent photos of the justices that they could find, as well as videos of the justices giving speeches, to get what their gestures or facial expressions seem to look like. In modeling the justices, Johnson explains that they were very careful to not model the justices as irritated or agreeing, because he notes, the modelers were not in the courtroom.

One of the first things viewers notice — and the source of some negative feedback on social media — is that the videos of the judges are not hyper-realistic, but appear animated. Johnson explains that the creators purposely made the justices appear animated, but realistic. In fact, Johnson says that they have very realistic videos and that they are fairly easy to create.

“What we wanted to do is make very clear to the public and the legal community, even the justices, that what we care about is the authentic audio,” Johnson said. He thought that making the justices intentionally cartoonish — though not cartoony — “would make that demarcation between authentic audio and AI-generated video incredibly stark.”

It is possible, however, that the project will be more realistic in the future, and Johnson notes it has been debated. “It is still up for discussion between our creative team as well as the academic side,” Johnson said. “Everything is on the table for the future because AI is changing so rapidly. The technology is just unbelievable.”

Johnson says that they hope to also have AI videos for oral arguments, so viewers can see the whole court interacting. “We will be making changes, and we will be updating the models on a pretty regular basis,” Johnson avowed.

The U.S. Supreme Court has not commented on the project. However, Johnson argues that the court’s reluctance to permit cameras is not about resisting transparency, but out of procedural concerns and media portrayals.

“The conventional wisdom — and I actually buy the conventional wisdom — is that the justices really want to stay above politics, and so the way to stay above politics is really to not engage in politics if at all humanly possible, or, at least as little as humanly possible, so they try to keep the vast majority of their decision-making process secretive,” Johnson states.

“Beyond the secrecy, the justices really are convinced that the media will take segments of oral argument or opinion announcements out of context and essentially sound-bite justices in the same way that maybe members of Congress are sound-bited,” Johnson explains.

“Once the court started livestreaming in May of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I have not seen any evidence that the media has actually cut sound-bites differently from audio or from transcripts to make justices ‘look bad’ or sound-bite particularly nasty exchanges,” Johnson said. “But they’re certainly worried about that happening, and they think that it would be worse for them if people could see and hear them.”

How the videos are circulated on social media and reactions from the public are still developing. Johnson reports an overwhelmingly positive response from the legal community.

“Our impetus is not to have any particular clips that would be bad or good for the justices,” Johnson averred. “It is simply to open up the Supreme Court of the United States in a way that has never been open to the public before.”

On the Docket’s website introduces the service and shows users how to subscribe to free videos on YouTube.