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AI Police Reports: Year in Review

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Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#171

Post by pyth0 »

sejje wrote: post #141
tialaramex wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIUI US policing is descended from slave catching and strike breaking. Two activities which I think we'd say today are obviously bad. In many European states their policing starts as town guards tasked with ensuring order. Order is, at least, not obviously bad. So that's a philosophical difference in what these forces even think their purpose is.

You understand it wrong. That's not where police come from.

If you want to make your comment useful, you could share some information about where you understand policing in America to have originated.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#172

Post by Dilettante_ »

verisimi wrote: post #74
roenxi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell from poking people on HN about what "AGI" means, there might be a general belief that the median human is not intelligent. Given that the current batch of models apparently isn't AGI I'm struggling to see a clean test of what AGI might be that a human can pass.

> there might be a general belief that the median human is not intelligent This is to deconstruct the question. I don't think it's even wrong - a lot of people are doing things, making decisions, living life perfectly normally, successfully even, without applying intelligence in a personal way. Those with socially accredited 'intelligence' would be the worst offenders imo - they do not apply their intelligence person…

>knowing why you are doing what you are doing[...] Computers can only do an imitation of this sort of answer. People stand a chance of answering it.

I'm not following. A computer's "why" is a written program, surely that is the most clear expression of its intent you could ask for?

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#173

Post by antonvs »

gambiting wrote: post #169
antonvs wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

My thoughts on this are as serious as it gets - AI in it's current state is no more than clever statistics. I will not be comparing how my own brain functions to what is effectively a linear algebra machine, as it's insulting to the intelligence of everyone here - what kind of serious thought would you like to have here, exactly?

You’re very adamant about not doing an obvious comparison. You want to stop thinking at that point. It’s an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. Quite an interesting one as well, that possibly suggests a threat response.

The assumption you seem to keep making is that things like “clever statistics” and “linear algebra” simply have no bearing on human intelligence. Why do you think that? Is it a religious view, that e.g. you believe humans have a soul that somehow connects to our intelligence, making it forever out of reach of machine emulation?

Because unless that’s your position, then the question of how human intelligence differs from current machine intelligence, the question that you simply refuse to contemplate, is one of the more important questions in this space.

The insult I see to intelligence here is the total lack of intellectual curiosity that wants to shoot down an entire line of thinking for reasons that apparently can’t be articulated.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#175

Post by m3047 »

Upvoted because I think it's an important topic, but this take causes me to question the motive for the article... which ironically is my big concern with using LLMs to write stuff generally (the unconscious censoring / proctoring of voice and viewpoint):

  That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a
  contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police
  report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say,
  “the AI wrote that.”
IANAL but if they signed off on it then presumably they own it. Same as if it was Microsoft Dog, an intern, whatever. If they said "the AI shat it" then I'd ask "what parts did you find unacceptable and edit?" and then expect we'd get the juicy stuff hallucinations or "I don't recall". Did they write this, or are they testifying to the veracity of hearsay?

From what I've seen reports written by / for lawyers / jurists / judges already "pull" to a voice and viewpoint; I'll leave it there.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#176

Post by jMyles »

eterevsky wrote: post #40

I think whether any text is written with the help of AI is not the main issue. The real issue is that for texts like police reports a human still has to take full responsibility for its contents. If we preserve this understanding, than the question of which texts are generated by AI becomes moot.

> for texts like police reports

If what you mean is, "texts upon which the singular violence of the state is legitimately imposed", then a simple solution (and I believe, on sufficiently long time scales, the happily inevitable one) is to abolish police.

I can't fathom, in an age where we have ubiquitous cameras as eyewitnesses, instant communications capability to declare emergencies and request aid from nearby humans, that we need an exclusivity entity whose job it is to advance safety in our communities. It's so, so, so much more trouble that it's worth.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#177

Post by jMyles »

moffkalast wrote: post #59
eterevsky wrote: post #40

I think whether any text is written with the help of AI is not the main issue. The real issue is that for texts like police reports a human still has to take full responsibility for its contents. If we preserve this understanding, than the question of which texts are generated by AI becomes moot.

I agree. A programmer has to take responsibility for the generated code they push, and so do police officers for the reports they file. Using a keyboard does not absolve you of typos, it's your responsibility to proofread and correct, this is no different, just a lot more advanced. Of course the problem is also that police often operates without any real oversight and covers up more misconduct than workers in an unde…

> But that's another issue.

...is it?

It seems to me that the growth of professional police as an institution which bears increased responsibility for public safety, along with an ever-growing set of tools that can be used to defer responsibility (see: it's not murder if it's done with a stun gun, regardless of how predictable these deaths are), are actually precisely the same issue.

Let's stop allowing the state to hide behind tooling, and all be approximately equally responsible for public safety.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#178

Post by Dilettante_ »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #156
sejje wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs provide sources every time I ask them. They do it by going out and searching, not by storing a list of sources in their corpus.

have you ever tried examining the sources? they actually just invent many "sources" when requested to provide sources

When talking about LLMs as search engine replacements, I think the stark difference in utility people see stems from the usecase. Are you perhaps talking about using it for more "deep research"?

Because when I ask chatgpt/perplexity things like "can I microwave a whole chicken" or "is Australia bigger than the moon" it will happily google for the answers and give me links to the sites it pulled from for me to verify for myself.

On the other hand, if you ask it to summarize the state-of-the art in quantum computing or something, it's much more likely to speak "off the top of its head", and even when it pulls in knowledge from web searches it'll rely much more on it's own "internal corpus" to put together an answer, which is definitely likely to contain hallucinations and obviously has no "source" aside from "it just knowing"(which it's discouraged from saying so it makes up sources if you ask for them).

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#179

Post by lubujackson »

The solution is to remove the temptation to hit a "looks good" button. A non-shitty AI tool could return a bullet list of events and time stamps:

- officer said "Freeze!" at 3:12:34am - "my arm!" said person #2 at 3:12:48am

Then the office must at a minimum reformat the events into text and add their own details. Again, AI is a tool and it is immensely useful if we treat it like a tool and not a panacea.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#180

Post by m3047 »

0x_rs wrote: post #36

I recommend taking a look at this video to get an idea behind the through process (or lack thereof) law enforcement might display when provided with a number of "AI" tools, and even if this one example is closer to traditional face recognition than LLMs, the behavior seems the same. Spoiler: complete submission and deference, and in this specific case to a system that was not even their own. https://www.youtube.com/w…

I can read that "submission and deference" at the casino as conflict avoidance, the arresting officer says to his peers at the station that he "kind of believes" the suspect. He also states at some point that he can't cite (and I infer then release) the suspect because he is not certain who he is, and therefore has to arrest him as a "John Doe" so that his identity can be established. The fact (?) that the suspect now has a police record for this possible farce won't be settled until after the facts are determined in a court of law.

This video demonstrates that when it comes down to it the blunt end of law enforcement is oftentimes a shit show of "seems to work for me" and that goes for facial recognition, shot spotter, contraband dogs, drug & DNA tests, you name it.

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