Authors
Alexandre Hudon
Published in
JMIR mental health. Jul 19, 2026. Epub Jul 19, 2026.
Abstract
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), has renewed interest in their potential role in forensic psychiatry report writing. Recent evidence demonstrates that contemporary LLMs perform strongly on selected medical knowledge, documentation, and information-management tasks and may reduce administrative burden when deployed under appropriate clinical supervision. However, forensic psychiatric reports differ fundamentally from routine clinical documentation. They constitute expert evidence prepared for legal proceedings and therefore require transparent reasoning, explicit weighing of competing evidence, a robust factual foundation, and personal professional accountability. This viewpoint examines whether AI can and should be used in forensic psychiatry report writing by integrating recent empirical evidence, forensic psychiatry guidance, legal and regulatory frameworks, and emerging governance recommendations. Rather than comparing AI with an idealized human evaluator, the manuscript argues that the appropriate comparison is between two imperfect systems of reasoning. Human experts remain susceptible to cognitive biases, omission errors, and disagreement, whereas contemporary LLMs exhibit distinct vulnerabilities, including hallucinations, hidden omissions, probabilistic reasoning, and limited explainability. Although the mechanisms differ, both may ultimately compromise the reliability of expert evidence if left unchecked. Current evidence supports AI for bounded, reversible, and independently verifiable tasks such as document organization, chronology construction, indexing, transcription, and structured summarization, particularly within secure and validated environments. By contrast, there remains insufficient evidence to support AI-assisted generation or material shaping of psycholegal reasoning, credibility assessments, or final forensic opinions. Because these activities require interpretation, accountability, and reasoning that can withstand judicial scrutiny, they remain fundamentally human responsibilities. The most defensible implementation model is therefore one of AI around the report rather than AI writing the report, in which AI serves as a supervised productivity tool while the forensic psychiatrist retains full authorship, accountability, and justification of all substantive conclusions.
PMID:
42472480
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 20 Jul 2026.
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