> [...] 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 currently available, probably because of existing Microsoft relations. And on top of all that, they hope to be able to rely on "Please review the outputs" which obviously isn't an actual solution here, of course people will get complacent and throw stuff over the wall whenever they can.
> “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 which were also run through AI and on and on, an inconsistency that leaks in at a previous step will check out when someone reviews the output against the inputs.
We’re all also discovering that many people’s idea of reviewing the output is to skim it and verify that it looks convincing enough. Checking facts is hard and takes time. These people are using AI because they want to work less, not to give themselves extra work.
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.
This is definitely the most interesting question in a ton of AI applications. I think folks should be really be spending a lot of time on figuring out how to deterministically check AI outputs in a way that's reliable in order to reduce the amount of work a human has to check, and to build tools that speed up the checking process.
Thinking about all of the fake citations in legal submissions that have come up of late, it seems pretty straightforward to set up a regex that captures all forms in which a cited case might be written (I could be wrong but I'd assume there's some standard variety of formats) and search those against a database (again assuming such a database exists) to ensure they all exist.
Then for the tougher problem of making sure that the cited cases say whatever the document citing them says they do, you could have an LLM run through the document, pull out the text with the case name and text about why it's being cited, then read the case and try to determine whether the reason for citing it is valid. Rather than just give a yes/no, you'd put the doc in front of the user and let them jump from citation to citation. On each citation, it'd pop up a card that shows the literal text of why it's being cited, a judgement from the LLM of whether it matches what the case says, and snippets of text from the case as evidence + deeplinks to that text within the case.
Or maybe you wouldn't even want to give the LLM's judgement since people might rely on that without reading, but there's definitely a way to speed up the review.
I believe OpenEvidence does something like this with medical papers. If you ask it a medical question, it doesn't answer so much as link you directly to the relevant papers so you can read them and determine if they're useful. Avoids all of the potential risks of using an LLM but still hugely valuable and time-saving for docs.
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 something.
and we are making everything worse by the minute. One gov push back on Ai nonsense, ibm/rh cames up with all sort of lies that would make any engineer or research laugh on their faces (federated learning being for privacy, instead of cost cutting. or explainable Ai being real, and not something bolted after the inference with extra unexplainable inference. etc.) but that are good enough to fool the regulator.
The mindset must be that if you use AI (which I happen to advocate for) you are also responsible for the output, if you use the output publicly. AI is obviously very powerful if used responsibly - the human is responsible for it once it is used - however it’s used.
I think the problem is that, this is practically speaking impossible adjacent. I think generally speaking writing is way easier than editing, especially at scale. This isn’t binary or all or nothing, it’s not like “you can never use AI”. But I think we need to go back to augmentation over generation.
A person produces the content and AI removes barriers, and contextually accelerates the process keeping you in a flow state, rather than AI generates human edits.
> on top of all that, they hope to be able to rely on "Please review the outputs" which obviously isn't an actual solution here, of course people will get complacent and throw stuff over the wall whenever they can.
This is honestly the fundamental problem of AI as I see it
When we offload our work to a different person we can calibrate our expectations to our past experiences with that person. With AI the experience is not very consistent. To use AI effectively you basically should treat it as a low trust, brand new coworker every single time you use it
That doesn't really scale, so people have two choices: be constantly hyper vigilant for mistakes the AI makes, or become complacent and trust it more than they should
People rightly point out that humans make mistakes too, not just AI. But humans have a pretty manageable cap on the amount of output they can produce. One human can pretty thoroughly review the outputs of a small team of other humans
One human can't possibly thoroughly review the volume of output that an LLM they are prompting can produce
Yeah, it's like declaring self driving safe because people are told to remain alert with their hands on the wheel, ready to take over in an instant. It's a charade.
We can get ambitious and try to head toward a form of statement more probative than even an officer personally typing a report: Have them narrate the facts of the event and the reasons for their decisions as soon as possible after the incident, as a video. Additions and corrections made later would be separate annotations. Where text is needed, auto-transcribe.
Courts prefer to have live witness testimony for a good reason. Detectives prefer to have statements made with the events as fresh as possible for a good reason. At the same time an oral report can save time and labor. Where we can take police or witness testimony verbally, more promptly, and with less work, and including body language, we should.
I feel like this is where AI like -
Are we thinking about how we’re using it, or???
It seems like; there’s two kinds of data that might go into this, boilerplate and subjective information. Subjective information should be input by the police, because I would assert the specific wording matters. It matters that the words used to describe what the policeman saw comes out of the policeman’s brain. If it’s boilerplate, I’d AI really more reliable then copy-paste?
At nearly £500 a year is an FT subscription worth it? Am I going to get invaluable stock tips that will cover the sub?!
Speaking as someone who subscribed earlier this year, the Lex column does provide subtle stock tips, but my real interest in it is the fact that it’s aimed at people who have a financial interest in accurate news, so the reporting doesn’t veer off into pushing moralistic narratives like other UK news sources.
I was granted a free subscription to the FT when I was at grad school 9 years ago, surprisingly it still continues to work to this day…
How much did you pay for grad school? ;)
The price is set for people who will expense it to their employers.
You can usually find a way to get it for free or cheaper through a library, other institution or your employer if working in the financial sector or education.
I never thought AI would be the fork in the road to Idiocracy. Can you believe that the people whose evidence and testimony in court means so much, value The Great Hallucinator over hand work? They give a few nice sounding options for using AI ("checking child porn"), but it of course won't end there. They already started. People are so fucking lazy.
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 to the point of just being the weird odd balls that everyone else would just shut up already.