When nobody can explain how the AI decided.

A new legal paper looks at what happens when courts need to weigh evidence from AI systems. The challenge is not just technical complexity but opacity: decisions made through processes that nobody, including the system's creators, can explain.

The paper examines how existing rules of evidence handle AI-generated records when the reasoning cannot be reconstructed. It is one thing to accept a calculation nobody checks. It is another to accept a decision nobody can trace.

This matters most when money or liberty turns on whether the AI got it right. The dispute becomes: did the system decide what it claims to have decided, and can anyone prove how?

A witness would show what inputs the system received, what it output, and when. It could not explain the black box, but it would prove the decision happened as logged and was not edited later. That is often the difference between a claim and evidence.