Submissions to the Honourable Chief Justice Michael Grant AO, Chief Justice of Northern Territory dated 7 October 2025

I. Introduction

1. This submission is provided for the information of the Supreme Court of Northern Territory, noting that, as at October 2025, no specific guidance or practice direction has been issued concerning the use of generative artificial intelligence in judicial or professional practice.
2. The purpose of this paper is to summarise national developments in this area, identify the common baseline understanding that has emerged across other jurisdictions, and outline how AI systems can be designed to reflect law’s discipline — verifiable, auditable, and structured according to legal reasoning.

II. National Baseline Understanding

3. Across jurisdictions, courts have converged on a baseline understanding of generative AI:
   1. LLMs are probabilistic text generators that predict the next word.
   2. They do not reason in a human or legal sense.
   3. They are prone to hallucinations (non-existent cases).
   4. Their processes are opaque (no audit trail).
   5. They conflate fact, inference, and opinion.
   6. Human verification of all citations is essential.