<
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/chatbots-offer-cops-the-ultimate-out-to-spin-police-reports-expert-says/>
'If you were suspected of a crime, would you trust a chatbot to accurately
explain what happened?
Some police departments think the tech is ready. And officers who have started
using chatbots to quickly complete their most dreaded task of drafting police
reports seemingly don't want to go back to spending hours each week doing their
own paperwork.
In June, a police department in Frederick, Colorado, boasted that it was the
"first law enforcement agency in the world to go live with Axon Draft One," a
new kind of police tech that allows a chatbot to spit out AI-generated police
reports almost immediately after a body camera stops recording a police
interaction.
Powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 model—which also fuels ChatGPT—Draft One was
initially pitched in April to police departments globally. Axon, a
billion-dollar company known for its tasers and body cameras, hyped it as "a
revolutionary new software product that drafts high-quality police report
narratives in seconds based on auto-transcribed body-worn camera audio." And
according to Axon, cops couldn't wait to try it out, with some departments
eagerly joining trials.
Ars confirmed that by May, Frederick's police department was the first agency
to purchase the product, soon followed by an untold number of departments
around the US.
Relying exclusively on body camera audio—not video—Draft One essentially
summarizes the key points of a recording, similar to how AI assistants
summarize the audio of a Zoom meeting.
This may seem like an obvious use for AI, but legal and civil rights experts
have warned that the humble police report is the root of the entire justice
system, and tampering with it could have serious consequences. Police reports
influence not just plea bargains, sentencing, discovery processes, and trial
outcomes, but also how society holds police accountable.
"The forcing function of writing out a justification, and then swearing to its
truth, and publicizing that record to other legal professionals
(prosecutors/judges) is a check on police power," law expert Andrew Ferguson
wrote in the first law review article analyzing Draft One's potential impacts
when compared to human reporting. Additionally, "police reports also serve as
the factual grounding for civil lawsuits and insurance claims," Ferguson noted.
By introducing chatbots that are known to hallucinate, confuse jokes for facts,
or randomly add incorrect information, police tech like Draft One could be used
to legitimize wrongful arrests, reinforce police suspicions, mislead courts, or
even cover up police abuse, experts have cautioned.'
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
