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Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

ft.com

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#41

> [...] he had intervened at forces that were deploying commercially available AI tools before they had been properly assessed [...] “All forces have got a good policy on the use of Copilot,” Murray said. “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.” Not only are they using AI before they've properly assessed them, they also end up using Copilot which must be one of the worse AIs cur…

> “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.” Everyone I talk to (including outside of tech) is going through this phase at their companies. It’s not working. Checking the output seems like a simple request, but the question becomes: Check against what? If the police are making a document that sources from another report that another officer used AI to produce from their notes whic…

> Checking the output seems like a simple request, but the question becomes: Check against what?

A colleague of mine circulated "minutes" from a meeting last week, there were only three of us in the meeting (one external service provider, my colleague + me).

There were several items on the "minutes" which I didn't recall being discussed, so I asked him if he'd had AI help, he said AI was filling in the gaps based on its knowledge of other discussions he'd had with it.

Glorious.

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will self correct in a longer timescale as police prosecution fails to maintain a conviction rate and people ask why. Hardly ideal but this isn't a static problem. Either the work gets done or cases get lost on slop.

Not if solicitors and judges too offload to AI.

Futurama being prescient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqn8HB2w2Fs

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can ask, what is a practical difference between “Check everything that it produces” and “Do all the work yourself”? It’s not typing that’s the bottleneck, at least not often, so this is essentially assuming that you can do all the needed work without actually doing it, which is obviously wishful thinking.

excellent point. it is like saying computers in the 90s. remember how the bank giving your money to the wrong person was a crime? and then when "the computet" did it was just business as usual and you paid more for banking because now they had "computer fraud" insurance? same thing. cop deliver false report, jail (hah! i know). now, it was "the Ai". so no jail, they will go back and put rules for the cop to read or s…

All this, so people like us can do a job that wasn't that hard in the first place (and in fact was quite comfortable all things considered), just a little bit easier, for companies that are promising to lay us off for productivity gains that aren't even measurable.

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me how shocked people seem to be at the realization of just how fucking lazy people are. Sure, there are definitely differences in actual improvement through technology compared to sheer laziness. Movies tropes like Idicocray or even animated like Wall-E weren't far off either. It's just so much easier to be lazy. The number of people that do not go down these sci-fi trope timelines will be pretty small…

What's kept us going in the past then? Was it really just poverty?

We are apex predators. We are meant to be lazy. Ever see a lion fill out a TPS report? Of course not, they lay around, eat, make babies, and sleep.

Couple it with a society in which nothing really matters no one really cares? Well that’s what we have now.

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#45

> [...] he had intervened at forces that were deploying commercially available AI tools before they had been properly assessed [...] “All forces have got a good policy on the use of Copilot,” Murray said. “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.” Not only are they using AI before they've properly assessed them, they also end up using Copilot which must be one of the worse AIs cur…

If we need to check everything AI produces, every reference and factual assertion, where is the value in what it's producing? Why should we spend the money on producing this, and the time reviewing it, when I can just do it right the first time? Where is the efficiency?

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#46
post #39
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a massive document, without any real context as to what thinking went into the points it's making, tell me if it looks ok. Oh, and there's 10 more where that came from. We're outsourcing the thinking to the recipient. Yes, it's way easier to create the report now, but it's not being honed down to the crux of the points it needs to make. And the reviewers are expected to what? Up their ability to mentally consu…

Never before has the adage "if I took* more time I would have written less" been true. *Yes, I know

[deleted]

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#47
I’m even seeing colleagues using AI slop instead of writing responses on Slack/Teams… I have no idea if I should call out this behaviour, usually I have been saying “finding the above text difficult to parse” followed by a yes/no question seems to get me closer the the answers I need but it’s excruciating to work like this.

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#48

> [...] he had intervened at forces that were deploying commercially available AI tools before they had been properly assessed [...] “All forces have got a good policy on the use of Copilot,” Murray said. “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.” Not only are they using AI before they've properly assessed them, they also end up using Copilot which must be one of the worse AIs cur…

> “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.” Everyone I talk to (including outside of tech) is going through this phase at their companies. It’s not working. Checking the output seems like a simple request, but the question becomes: Check against what? If the police are making a document that sources from another report that another officer used AI to produce from their notes whic…

> Checking facts is hard and takes time.

This is a reasoning skill and I fear we are losing this skill if we do not update our education systems (all over the world) very fast. Children will use AI, and we should also see this as a tool. However, children now need to learn how to verify the output of the tool, and this is something what they do not do (and they also are not incentivized to do so). Which needs to change, otherwise the next generation of people exiting high school can use AI, but they have not learned how to reason themselves.

This also happens I guess in companies, AI is the simple way, the reasoning is the "hard" part which costs energy, and people need to be incentivized to do so. I have no idea how to create that incentive though.

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.” Everyone I talk to (including outside of tech) is going through this phase at their companies. It’s not working. Checking the output seems like a simple request, but the question becomes: Check against what? If the police are making a document that sources from another report that another officer used AI to produce from their notes whic…

> Checking facts is hard and takes time. This is a reasoning skill and I fear we are losing this skill if we do not update our education systems (all over the world) very fast. Children will use AI, and we should also see this as a tool. However, children now need to learn how to verify the output of the tool, and this is something what they do not do (and they also are not incentivized to do so). Which needs to chan…

Education system has already lost and it happened before AI. The problem is that reasoning requires a very good literacy skills and these require a lot of practice to develop, but we stopped forcing students to practice this quite some time ago. A mass of illiterate students have been reality for several years all over the world.

Re: Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

#50

> [...] he had intervened at forces that were deploying commercially available AI tools before they had been properly assessed [...] “All forces have got a good policy on the use of Copilot,” Murray said. “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.” Not only are they using AI before they've properly assessed them, they also end up using Copilot which must be one of the worse AIs cur…

> “All forces will have a policy that says, ‘Check everything that it produces’.” Everyone I talk to (including outside of tech) is going through this phase at their companies. It’s not working. Checking the output seems like a simple request, but the question becomes: Check against what? If the police are making a document that sources from another report that another officer used AI to produce from their notes whic…

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