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AI Police Reports: Year in Review

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Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#71

Post by BrenBarn »

lostnground wrote: post #27
BrenBarn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we need a greatly reduced standard of proof for officer misconduct, especially when it comes to consequences like just losing your job (as opposed to, e.g., jail time).

While I agree that officers should be accountable. More enforcement of them will not suddenly make them good officers. Other nations train their police for years prior to putting them into the thick of it. US police spend far less time studying, and it shows, in everything from de-escalation tactics to general legal understanding. If you create a pipeline to weed out bad officers, then there needs to be a pipeline pr…

Certainly agreed on that. I think part of it is training but also part of it is just vetting. There are pretty clearly too many people who get into policing out of a desire to wield authority rather than a desire to help people. In many cases I think there is not much use in trying to "train" such people; they just need to be doggedly weeded out. But yes, we need action on both ends, ensuring the pipeline produces good officers going in, and then also regular monitoring to ensure they stay good.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#72

Post by inavida »

hopelite wrote: post #65
zmgsabst wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d suspect the other direction: Police unions get LLMs classified as some kind of cognitive aid, so it becomes discrimination to ban them in school or the workplace.

That is an aspect I had not considered in my assumptions that AI/robots will eventually go through the same/similar social justice process as all the other causes, i.e., women’s suffrage, racial equality, gay rights, etc. because it will ultimately and, arguably, more than all the other prior social justice causes célèbres, serve the ruling class that has risen to dominate through social justice causes far more than…

Cynical and fun to read but no. Too many parasites have already chewed their way to the empty heart of power of the post-war liberal system, and I think the next time it gets power at the highest levels in the US will be the end if it there. Maybe it will last another generation in Europe, but not long enough to see the scenario you describe play out.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#73

Post by latexr »

opan wrote: post #42
charcircuit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is smarter than everyone already. Seriously, the breadth of knowledge the AI possesses has no human counterpart.

It's pretty similar to looking something up with a search engine, mashing together some top results + hallucinating a bit, isn't it? The psychological effects of the chat-like interface + the lower friction of posting in said chat again vs reading 6 tabs and redoing your search, seems to be the big killer feature. The main "new" info is often incorrect info. If you could get the full page text of every url on the fir…

> I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.

If they do, you’ll be in good company. That post is about the exact opposite of what people usually link it for. I’ll let Dan explain:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#74

Post by verisimi »

roenxi wrote: post #60
Marha01 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves Well, in many cases they might be right..

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 personally but simply massage themselves and others towards consensus. Which is ultimately materially beneficial to them - so why not?

For me 'intelligence' would be knowing why you are doing what you are doing without dismissing the question with reference to 'convention', 'consensus', someone/something else. Computers can only do an imitation of this sort of answer. People stand a chance of answering it.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#75

Post by BoxOfRain »

lithocarpus wrote: post #12
DetectDefect wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such innocent mistakes make me smile these days because it gives assurance a real human wrote them.

Don't worry sufficiently advanced LLMs will learn how to put in the right amount of typoes to be convincing.

Swearing is a good heuristic still I think. The American corporate world remains rather prissy about swearing, so if the post sounds like a hairy docker after 12 pints then it's probably not an LLM.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#76

Post by jops »

abelitoo wrote: post #63
krainboltgreene wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, what are we supposed to do with people who think the above?

I'd do the same thing I'd do with anyone that has a different opinion than me: try my best to have an honest and open discussion with them to understand their point of view and get to the heart of why they believe said thing, without forcefully tearing apart their beliefs. A core part of that process is avoiding saying anything that could cause them to feel shame for believing something that I don't, even if I truly…

Well said, and thank you for the final paragraph. Made me chuckle.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#77

Post by figassis »

roenxi wrote: post #60
Marha01 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves Well, in many cases they might be right..

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.

Being an intelligent being is not the same as being considered intelligent relative to the rest of your species. I think we’re just looking to create an intelligence, meaning, having the attributes that make a being intelligent, which mostly are the ability to reason and learn. I think the being might take over from there no?

With humans, the speed and ease with which we learn and reason is capped. I think a very dumb intelligence with stay dumb for not very long because every resource will be spent in making it smarter.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#78

Post by ptx »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #58
fzeroracer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way LLM search engines save time is if you take what it says at face value as truth. Otherwise you still have to fact check whatever it spews out which is the actual time consuming part of doing proper research. Frankly I've seen enough dangerous hallucinations from LLM search engines to immediately discard anything it says.

Of course you have to fact check - but verification is much faster and easier than searching from scratch.

How is verification faster and easier? Normally you would check an article's citations to verify its claims, which still takes a lot of work, but an LLM can't cite its sources (it can fabricate a plausible list of fake citations, but this is not the same thing), so verification would have to involve searching from scratch anyway.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#79

Post by eCa »

charcircuit wrote: post #37
futuraperdita wrote: post #16

What worries me is that _a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves_ and anthropmorphize them into a sort of human-exact intelligence. The worst-case scenario of Utah's law is that when the disclaimer is added that the report is generated by AI, enough jurists begin to associate that with "likely more correct than not".

AI is smarter than everyone already. Seriously, the breadth of knowledge the AI possesses has no human counterpart.

Just this weekend it (Gemini) has produced two detailed sets of instructions on how to connect different devices over bluetooth, including a video (that I didn’t watch), while the devices did not support doing the connections in that direction. No reasonable human reading the involved manuals would think those solutions feasible. Not impressed, again.

Re: AI Police Reports: Year in Review

#80

Post by ssl-3 »

tarsinge wrote: post #69
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 don’t understand the urgency to replace human work with AI. Why is every organization so eager about skipping the AI as an assistant step? Here there are already massive productivity gains in using the AI to create the draft of the report, it makes little economical to make it do the final version compared to the risk, maybe it’s just plain laziness? Same with developers, why is very organization wanting to leapfro…

Not everyone is in an urgent hurry to replace people with bots; that's a hyperbolic construct.

But to try to answer some of what I think you're trying to ask about: The bot can be useful. It can be better at writing a coherent collection of paragraphs or subroutines than Alice or Bill might be, and it costs a lot less to employ than either of them do.

Meanwhile: The bot never complains to HR because someone looked at them sideways. The bot [almost!] never calls in sick; the bot can work nearly 24/7. The bot never slips and falls in the parking lot. The bot never promises to be on-duty while they vacation out-of-state with a VPN or uses a mouse-jiggler to screw up the metrics while they sleep off last night's bender.

The bot mostly just follows instructions.

There's lots of things the bot doesn't get right. Like, the stuff it produces may be full of hallucinations and false conclusions that need reviewed, corrected, and outright excised.

But there's lots of Bills and Alices in the world who are even worse, and the bot is a lot easier and cheaper to deal with than they are.

That said: When it comes to legal matters that put a real person's life and freedom in jeopardy, then there should be no bot involved.

If a person in a position of power (such as a police officer) can't write a meaningful and coherent report on their own, then I might suggest that this person shouldn't ever have a job where producing written reports are a part of their job. There's probably something else they're good at that they can do instead (the world needs ditchdiggers, too).

Neither the presence nor absence of a bot can save the rest of us from the impact of their illiteracy.

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