Subscribers to the print edition of Investment Executive will soon see a feature I’ve written about Simon Roy, vice-president and chief technology officer at iA Financial. It’s about his team’s approach to rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) across the operation.

Like a lot of companies, iA started with a notetaking tool that listens in on call centre conversations and transcribes client discussions. They aren’t perfect, but they’re far from bad.

It got us thinking about how these AI notes might hold up in court, if (or more likely when) a case hinges on the difference between a person’s notes and a bot’s.

I reached out to the Toronto law firm Torys to ask if this has come up. Lauren Nickerson, an associate there, said she’s unaware of any case law. But should that happen, existing liability principles would apply.

“Corporations are required to prepare and maintain records that accurately reflect meetings, and directors and officers should also keep records of their decision-making,” she wrote in an email. “At this point, it seems unlikely that Canadian courts would rely on AI-generated meeting notes over human notes, to the extent that they conflict.”

Not surprisingly, the issue is the persistence of so-called hallucinations. Nickerson told me that AI transcription tools make mistakes — this is a known-issue, to borrow the vernacular of IT shops.

Nickerson directed me to Zhang v. Chen, 2024 BCSC 285. In that case, the Supreme Court of British Columbia found that AI can’t be relied upon in place of professional expertise.

“Of course, human transcribers also mishear, reinterpret and fill in gaps when taking meeting notes,” she wrote. “However, from an evidentiary standpoint, judges are more likely to have confidence in human-produced notes because they will have the opportunity to ask questions of the person who transcribed them. AI cannot be questioned to prove documents in court.”

There’s nothing wrong with using these tools, Nickerson wrote, just make sure you’ve got someone reviewing them for accuracy. And only hang on to the approved version.

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