Matter of Weber

What happened

In an accounting proceeding for a trust, an objectant claimed that the trustee breached her fiduciary duty by retaining a rental property on Cat Island in the Bahamas instead of selling it. The objectant's damages expert, Charles W. Ranson, prepared a Supplemental Damages Report estimating what the trust would have earned had the property been sold and the proceeds invested.

On the stand, Mr. Ranson testified that he relied on Microsoft Copilot, a generative AI chat assistant, to cross-check his calculations. According to the decision, he "could not recall what input or prompt he used to assist him with the Supplemental Damages Report," and he could not explain how Copilot reached its results.

What the court did

Surrogate Jonathan G. Schopf found the damages testimony unreliable on grounds that did not depend on AI. The decision notes that Mr. Ranson had no real estate valuation expertise, that his premise of a 2004 sale was "entirely speculative," and that his calculations began "more than three (3) years too early" because the trust did not acquire the property until 2008.

The court then addressed the Copilot use separately. It stated: "The Court has no objective understanding as to how Copilot works, and none was elicited as part of the testimony." The court ran a sample prompt through Copilot on its own computers and received 3 different figures for the same investment question. It wrote that it "cannot blindly accept as accurate, calculations which are performed by artificial intelligence."

The decision then announced a requirement in these words: "prior to evidence being introduced which has been generated by an artificial intelligence product or system, counsel has an affirmative duty to disclose the use of artificial intelligence and the evidence sought to be admitted should properly be subject to a Frye hearing prior to its admission." A Frye hearing is New York's inquiry into whether a method is generally accepted in its field. The objections were denied in their entirety.

Where it stands

The decision resolved the objections and granted the petition for an intermediate accounting. No appeal was located. The disclosure requirement is stated in a trial-level decision of one Surrogate's Court.

The obligation it engaged

The central obligation engaged was Clause 5, reproducible analysis. A damages figure is only as good as the procedure that produced it. Here the procedure lived in a chat session whose inputs the expert could not recall. The court's own test showed that the same question returned different answers on different machines, so the result could not be re-run by anyone, including the expert.

Clause 7, contemporaneous record, follows directly. Had the prompts and outputs been logged as they were used, the expert could have answered the questions put to him. Clause 4, checkability before adoption, applies as well: a cross-check is only useful if its own basis can be examined. Clause 8, disclosure, is the subject of the requirement the court announced for AI-generated evidence offered in that court.

Sources

• Surrogate's Court, Saratoga County (via Justia) · October 10, 2024
  Matter of Weber, 2024 NY Slip Op 24258
• New York Daily Record · October 25, 2024
  New York Surrogates Court on admissibility of AI evidence

What could not be confirmed

No appeal or later history was located.