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From their faq: https://serenata.ai/en/faq/
1 - We were inspired by the Toblerone Affair, a case in which a Swedish politician was pushed to resign after being caught paying simple Toblerone chocolate bar with public money. That’s what we want to do: empower social control of public expenditures including values as low as a chocolate bar.
Namely, I'd like to see more public scrutiny against the illegal salaries judges receive in Brazil - which sometimes are twice or three times greater than the legal limit.
Slightly off-topic, but this is what a Serenata de Amor is in Brazil (it's a bonbon and it's very good, IMHO): https://i.imgur.com/tQZ0JHF.jpg
I assume it's also "love song" (well, "love serenade", to be a bit more accurate) :)
I love the idea, but a quick review of tweets shows a bunch of seemingly inconsequential reports for meal refunds where the issue is that the meal price is an outlier, but prices listed are 39 to 75 BRL (12-25 USD). That doesn't strike me as a funny meal price. Assuming it's not an error, it would be nice to have some additional context on what the observed distribution of meal prices is, because at a cursory glance…
In a simple risk game of likelihood vs. consequences, expensing a meal in an upper end restaurant will %90 draw political consequences from an AI, with a high degree of uncertainty in the cost to fight it, vs. accepting the hosts generosity, with a sub-%5 chance of consequences occurring like having to pay your share, or a minor sanction some years into the future.
I'd argue most politicians necessarily make risk and cost/benefit calculations before ethical signalling ones, and the indiscriminate application of rules in this case creates inverted incentives that demoralize the situation, and will cause them to start accepting insignificant bribes.
The economic value of "AI" is mostly to obfuscate and symbolically defray the chain of individual human accountability. While this may be working for the "good guys," in the public interest, it's really about protecting the people who are using what is essentially a Bayesian black box as an ethical proxy for their personal interest. It's fascinating and cool, but it's also a bit disingenuous to accept magical pretexts and other ethical proxies because we perceive them to be "on our side."
I love the idea, but a quick review of tweets shows a bunch of seemingly inconsequential reports for meal refunds where the issue is that the meal price is an outlier, but prices listed are 39 to 75 BRL (12-25 USD). That doesn't strike me as a funny meal price. Assuming it's not an error, it would be nice to have some additional context on what the observed distribution of meal prices is, because at a cursory glance…
R$239.50 or $74. That's 25% the minimum wage here in Brazil.
This means that this congressman was paying for someone else's meal, which is in itself an act of corruption.
And even if that's not the case, most Brazilians can't afford a 40 BRL meal on a regular basis, so why should a politician be able to do so with our money?
If you dig deeper into other reports, you can also see congresspeople spending public money in sex shops and clubs, for instance (https://twitter.com/cuducos/status/840882495868530688).
This project is using AI to analyse public data of receipts from elected government officials, detect anomalies and tweet about them. It has already led to a deputy to have to return funds to the government. There is very little material in English about this project, I finally spent some time to translate and create an English and French wikipedia page. I am not otherwise involved with this project (yet!) but think…
How is this project perceived by the government officials? I am sure (or at least hope) that some of them are very much in favour, but are there others calling into question the accuracy / legitimacy of these type of analyses?
No one beside themselves has the power to declare any of their spendings as illegal. So they could, for example, declare they spent $190 dollars on burger and fries for one person, and nobody can do anything about it.
Operation Serenata may tweet about it. Some people will read that and complain on twitter, and life goes on.
Our current unelected president was recorded talking about killing people to stay in power, and nothing happened. People in high-paying government jobs are tricking the system to get paid twice and nothing happens. Politicians can vote on their own pay raise, which they do many times per year, and nothing happens.
None of these big things have consequences, so something as small as someone spending a bit more on lunch is so irrelevant that they don't even care to try and hide it.
I love the idea, but a quick review of tweets shows a bunch of seemingly inconsequential reports for meal refunds where the issue is that the meal price is an outlier, but prices listed are 39 to 75 BRL (12-25 USD). That doesn't strike me as a funny meal price. Assuming it's not an error, it would be nice to have some additional context on what the observed distribution of meal prices is, because at a cursory glance…
I am a software developer, so I get paid more than the average Brazilian. And I spend 14~18 BRL (4.3 to 5.5 USD) on a good meal regularly.
39 to 75 BRL is very expensive to our standards. The restaurant I take my wife on our anniversary costs 60~70 BRL per person.
Someone spending close to 75 BRL per day is the equivalent of eating every day in that nice restaurant you go a couple times a year.