Top
Best
New

Posted by hn_acker 3 days ago

AI Police Reports: Year in Review(www.eff.org)
160 points | 121 comments
futuraperdita 7 hours ago|
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".
kylecazar 5 minutes ago||
Maybe it's just my circle, but anecdotally most of the non-CS folks I know have developed a strong anti-AI bias. In a very outspoken way.

If anything, I think they'd consider AI's involvement as a strike against the prosecution if they were on a jury.

theoreticalmal 1 minute ago||
Why do people in your circle not like AI? I have similar a experience about friends and family not liking AI, but usually it’s due to water and energy reasons, not because of an issue with the model reasoning
dataflow 1 hour ago|||
One problem here is "smarter" is an ambiguous word. I have no problem believing the average LLM has more knowledge than my brain; if that's what "smarter" means, them I'm happy to believe I'm stupid. But I sure doubt an LLM's ability to deduce or infer things, or to understand its own doubts and lack of knowledge or understanding, better than a human like me.
Marha01 5 hours ago|||
> a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves

Well, in many cases they might be right..

chrz 2 hours ago|||
So tired of this argument.
computerthings 2 hours ago||||
[dead]
roenxi 4 hours ago||||
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.
impossiblefork 2 hours ago|||
LLMs may appear to do well on certain programming tasks on which they are trained intensively, but they are incredibly weak. If you try to use an LLM to generate, for example, a story, you will find that it will make unimaginable mistakes. If you ask an LLM to analyze a conversation from the internet it will misrepresent the positions of the participants, often restating things so that they mean something different or making mistakes about who said what in a way that humans never do. The longer the exchange the more these problems are exacerbated.

We are incredibly far from AGI.

roenxi 44 minutes ago|||
We do have AI systems that write stories [0]. They work. The quality might not be spectacular but if you've ever gone out and spent time reading fanfiction you'd have to agree there are a lot of rather terrible human writers too (bless them). It still hits this issue that if we want LLMs to compete with the best of humanity then they aren't there yet, but that means defining human intelligence as something that most people don't have access to.

> If you ask an LLM to analyze a conversation from the internet it will misrepresent the positions of the participants, often restating things so that they mean something different or making mistakes about who said what in a way that humans never do.

AI transcription & summary seems to be a strong point of the models so I don't know what exactly you're trying to get to with this one. If you have evidence for that I'd actually be quite interested because humans are so bad at representing what other people said on the internet it seems like it should be an easy win for an AI. Humans typically have some wild interpretations of what other people write that cannot be supported from what was written.

[0] https://github.com/google-deepmind/dramatron

impossiblefork 17 minutes ago||
I haven't tried Dramatron, but my experience is that it isn't possible to do sensibly. With regard to the second part

>AI transcription & summary seems to be a strong point of the models so I don't know what exactly you're trying to get to with this one. If you have evidence for that I'd actually be quite interested because humans are so bad at representing what other people said on the internet it seems like it should be an easy win for an AI. Humans typically have some wild interpretations of what other people write that cannot be supported from what was written.

Transcription and summarization is indeed fine, but try posting a longer reddit or HN discussion you've been part of into any model of your choice and ask it to analyze it, and you will see severe errors very soon. It will consistently misrepresent the views expressed and it doesn't really matter what model you go for. They can't do it.

closewith 1 hour ago|||
This seems distant from my experience. Modern LLMs are superb at summarisation, far better than most people.
figassis 3 hours ago||||
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.

Timwi 2 hours ago||
Why would the dumb intelligence be less constrained than a human in making itself smarter?
lazide 2 hours ago||
I have yet to see an LLM with hands, feet, or eyeballs.

Currently, LLMs require hooks and active engagement with humans to ‘do’ anything. Including learn.

verisimi 3 hours ago|||
> 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.

cortic 2 hours ago|||
> ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway test in April 2025

So yes, most people are right in that assumption, at least by the metric of how we generally measure intelligence.

gilrain 3 minutes ago|||
> the metric of how [the uninformed] generally measure intelligence
ehnto 1 hour ago||||
Does an LLM scoring well on the Mensa test translate to it doing excellent and factual police reporting? It is probably not true of humans doing well on the Mensa, why would it be true of an LLM?

We should probably rigorously verify that, for a role that itself is about rigorous verification without reasonable doubt.

I can immediately, and reasonably, doubt the output of an LLM, pending verification.

vid 2 hours ago||||
Court reports should as much be about human sensibility. I have met plenty of high IQ people who were insensitive.
cortic 1 hour ago||
Having listened to some the new AI generated songs on utube, looks like they might be better at being sensitive humans than we are as well..
turtlesdown11 16 minutes ago|||
Yeah I certainly associate LLMs with high intelligence when they provide fake links to fake information, I think, man this thing is SMART
intended 6 hours ago|||
Reading how AI is being approached in China, the focus is more on achieving day to day utilty, without eviscerating youth employment.

In contrast, the SV focus of AI has been about skynet / singularity, with a hype cycle to match.

This is supported by the lack of clarity on actual benefits, or clear data on GenAI use. Mostly I see it as great for prototyping - going from 0 to 1, and for use cases where the operator is highly trained and capable of verifying output.

Outside of that, you seem to be in the land of voodoo, where you are dealing with something that eerily mimics human speech, but you don't have any reliable way of finding out its just BS-ing you.

latentsea 2 hours ago|||
Well at least DeepMind is doing nifty things like solving the protein folding problem.
simonjgreen 6 hours ago||||
Do you have any links you could share to content you found especially insightful about AI use in China?
logicprog 5 hours ago|||
I don't know if it supports their particular point, but Machine Decision is Not Final seems like a very cool and interesting look at China's culture around AI:

https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final...

andrepd 1 hour ago||
In the West we have autonomous systems to commit genocide, detecting and murdering "enemy combatants" at scale, where "enemy combatant" is defined as "male between the ages of 15 and 55".

Sometimes I'm not so sure about any so-called moral superiority.

intended 5 hours ago|||
I’ve been hunting for a link I found here on HN, which discussed how policy /government elites in China looked at AI.

Sadly, the search for that link continues.

I did find these from SCMP and Foreign Policy, but there are better articles out there.

- https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-yout...

- https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports...

mc32 2 hours ago|||
I’m not seeing the dichotomy as much as you do.

Are they not going to build a “skynet” in China? Second, building skynet doesn’t imply eviscerating youth employment.

On the other hand, automation of menial tasks does eviscerate all kinds of employment, not only youth emoloyment.

KronisLV 53 minutes ago|||
> a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves

I think the anthropomorphizing part is what messes with people. Is the autocomplete in my IDE smarter than I am? What about the search box on Google? What about a hammer or a drill?

Yet, I will admit that most of the time I hear people complaining about how AI written code is worse than that produced by developers, but it just doesn't match my own experience - it's frankly better (with enough guidance and context, say 95% tokens in and 5% tokens out, across multiple models working on the same project to occasionally validate and improve/fix the output, alongside adequate tooling) than what a lot of the people I know could or frankly do produce in practice.

That's a lot of conditions, but I think it's the same with the chat format - people accepting unvalidated drivel as fact, or someone using the web search and parsing documents and bringing up additional information that's found as a consequence of the conversation, bringing in external data and making use of the LLM ability to churn through a lot of it, sometimes better than the human reading comprehension would.

charcircuit 5 hours ago||
AI is smarter than everyone already. Seriously, the breadth of knowledge the AI possesses has no human counterpart.
eCa 3 hours ago|||
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.
opan 5 hours ago||||
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 first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations. (I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.)

It has no human counterpart in the same sense that humans still go to the library (or a search engine) when they don't know something, and we don't have the contents of all the books (or articles/websites) stored in our head.

latexr 3 hours ago|||
> 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

hombre_fatal 2 hours ago||
Dan makes a case for being charitable to the commenter and how lame it is to neener-neener into the past, not that it has some opposite meaning everyone is missing out on.
latexr 1 hour ago||
Dan clearly references how people misunderstand not only the comment (“he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application”) but also the whole interaction (“He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed”).

So yes, it is the opposite of why people link to it, which is to mock an attitude (which wasn’t there) of hubris and lack of understanding of what makes a good product.

throwuxiytayq 5 hours ago|||
> If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations.

Curiously, literally nobody on earth uses this workflow.

People must be in complete denial to pretend that LLM (re)search engines can’t be used to trivially save hours or days of work. The accuracy isn’t perfect, but entirely sufficient for very many use cases, and will arguably continue to improve in the near future.

turtlesdown11 11 minutes ago|||
> The accuracy isn’t perfect

The reason why people don't use LLMs to "trivially save hours or days of work" is because LLMs don't do that. People would use a tool that works. This should be evidence that the tools provide no exceptional benefit, why do you think that is not true?

antonvs 1 hour ago||||
> People must be in complete denial

That seems to be a big part of it, yes. I think in part it’s a reaction to perceived competition.

fzeroracer 4 hours ago|||
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.

throwuxiytayq 4 hours ago||
Of course you have to fact check - but verification is much faster and easier than searching from scratch.
ptx 3 hours ago|||
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.
hombre_fatal 2 hours ago||
Because it gives you an answer and all you have to do is check its source. Often you don’t have to do that since you have jogged your memory.

Versus finding the answer by clicking into the first few search results links and scanning text that might not have the answer.

ptx 1 hour ago||
As I said, how are you going to check the source when LLMs can't provide sources? The models, as far as I know, don't store links to sources along with each piece of knowledge. At best they can plagiarize a list of references from the same sources as the rest of the text, which will by coincidence be somewhat accurate.
skywhopper 3 hours ago|||
For most things, no it isn’t. The reason it can work well at all for software is that it’s often (though not always) easy to validate the results. But for giving you a summary of some topic, no, it’s actually very hard to verify the results without doing all the work over again.
zhoujianfu 5 hours ago||||
AI has more knowledge than everyone already, I wouldn't say smarter though. It's like wisdom vs intelligence in D+D (and/or life).. wisdom is knowing things, intelligence is how quick you can learn / create new things.
consp 3 hours ago|||
Knowledge is what I see equivalent with a big library. It contains mostly correct information in the context of the book (which might be incorrect in general) and "ai" is very good at taking everything out of context, Smashing a probability distribution over it and picking an answer which humans will accept. E.g. it does not contain knowledge, at best the vague pretense of it.
metalman 2 hours ago|||
AI has zero knowledge, as to know something is to have done it, or seen it first hand. AI has access to a great deal of data, much of it aquired through criminal action, but no way to evaluate that information other than cross checking for citations and similar occurances. Even for a human, infering things is difficult and uncertain, and so we regularly see AI fall of the cliff of cohearant word salading. We are heading strait at an idiocracy writ large that is trying to hide there raciorilgio insanity behind algorythims. Sometimes it's hard to tell, but it seems that a hairdresser has just been put in charge of the US passport office, which is highy sugestive of a new top level program to issue US citizenship on demand, but everbody else will be subject to the "impartiality" of privatly owned and operated AI policing.
godelski 50 minutes ago||||

  > the breadth of knowledge
knowledge != intelligence

If knowledge == intelligence then Google and Wikipedia are "smarter" than you and the AGI problem has been solved for several decades.

gloosx 1 hour ago||||
It's like saying google search is smarter than everyone, amount of information indexed by it has no human counterpart, such a silly take...
krainboltgreene 5 hours ago||||
Man, what are we supposed to do with people who think the above?
abelitoo 4 hours ago|||
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 believe they are wrong, and just doing what I can to earnestly hear them out. The optional thing afterwards, if they seem open to it, is express my own beliefs in a way that's palatable and easily understood. Basically explain it in a language they understand, and in a way that we can think about and understand and discuss together, not taking offense to any attempts at questioning or poking holes in my beliefs because that is the discovery process imo for trying something new.

Online is a little trickier because you don't know if they're a dog. Well, now a days it's even harder, because they could also not have a fully developed frontal lobe, or worse, they could be a bot, troll, or both.

jops 3 hours ago||
Well said, and thank you for the final paragraph. Made me chuckle.
cortic 1 hour ago||||
>ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway IQ test in April 2025

If you don't want to believe it, you need to change the goal posts; Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI.. since AI is also better at creating test than us maybe we could ask AI to do it, hang on..

>Is there a test that in some way measures intelligence, but that humans generally test better than AI?

Answer:Thinking, Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.

Edit, i managed to get one to answer me; the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI). Created by AI researcher François Chollet, this test consists of visual puzzles that require inferring a rule from a few examples and applying it to a new situation.

So we do have A test which is specifically designed for us to pass and AI to fail, where we can currently pass better than AI... hurrah we're smarter!

gloosx 57 minutes ago|||
>Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI

Easy? The best LLMs score 40% on Butter-Bench [1], while the mean human score is 95%. LLMs struggled the most with multi-step spatial planning and social understanding.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21860v1

piva00 1 hour ago|||
To be intelligent is to realise that any test for intelligence is at best a proxy for some parts of it. There's no objective way to measure intelligence as a whole, we can't even objectively define intelligence.
gambiting 5 hours ago||||
I don't know, it's kinda terrifying how this line of thinking is spreading even on HN. AI as we have it now is just a turbocharged autocomplete, with a really good information access. It's not smart, or dumb, or anything "human" .
design2203 2 hours ago|||
It just shows that true natural intelligence is difficult to define by proxy.
antonvs 1 hour ago|||
Do you think your own language processing abilities are significantly different from autocomplete with information access? If so, why?
drekipus 5 hours ago|||
Just brace for the societal correction.

There's a lot of things going on in the western world, both financial and social in nature. It's not good in the sense of being pleasant/contributing to growth and betterment, but it's a correction nonetheless.

That's my take on it anyway. Hedge bets. Dive under the wave. Survive the next few years.

solumunus 5 hours ago|||
Having knowledge is not exactly the same as being smart though is it.
charcircuit 2 hours ago|||
It's at least one component of it, and by being exceptional in that component it makes up for what it lacks in other components.
xandrius 3 hours ago||||
Although it helps immensely.
design2203 2 hours ago||
Only if you understand it..
cindyllm 5 hours ago|||
[dead]
eterevsky 5 hours ago||
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.
Ekaros 4 hours ago||
Sadly justice system is a place where responsibility does not happen. It is not a system where you make one mistake and you are to prison. Instead everyone but the victims of the system are protected and colluded with. More you punish the victims better you make out.
riedel 4 hours ago|||
Yes. Allowing officers to blame AI creates a major accountability gap. Per e.g. the EU AI Act’s logic, if a human "edits" a draft, they must be held responsible and do not need to disclose the use of AI.

To ensure safety, those offerings must use premarket red teaming to eliminate biases in summarization. However, ethical safety also requires post-market monitoring, which is impossible if logs aren't preserved. Rather than focusing on individual cases, I think, we must demand systemic oversight in general and access for independent research (not only focussing on a specific technology)

sixhobbits 4 hours ago||
It should be treated kind of the same as writing a report after a glass of wine. Probably no one really cares but "sorry that doesn't count because I was intoxicated when I wrote that bit" isn't going to fly.
tarsinge 3 hours ago|||
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 leapfrog from humans write all the code to they don’t even read the generated code?
ssl-3 3 hours ago|||
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.

chrz 2 hours ago||
and bot doesnt bare any responsibility
Spivak 2 hours ago|||
Because the biggest cost at a lot of orgs is staff. Your typical software shop will be comical—the salary costs towering down on all the others like LeBron James gazing down at ants. The moment you go from productivity gains to staff reduction you start making real money. Any amount of money for a machine that can fully replace a human process.
moffkalast 4 hours ago||
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 under-rug sweeping factory. But that's another issue.

d1sxeyes 4 hours ago||
> 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.”

Normally, if a witness (e.g. a police officer) were found to be recounting something written by a third party, it would be considered hearsay and struck from the record (on objection).

It would be an interesting legal experiment to have an officer using this system swear to which portions they wrote themselves, and attempt to have all the rest of the testimony disallowed as hearsay.

zmgsabst 4 hours ago|
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.

hopelite 4 hours ago||
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 anything prior.

It’s going to be interesting to see the state propaganda against the bigots and evil bioists (or whatever the word smithing apparatchiks will devise) so want to bar the full equality in society of AI/robots who look just like you and me after all and also just want equal rights to love each other, and who are you to oppose others since we are all just individuals?

Shoot the messenger all you want, but it’s coming.

inavida 3 hours ago||
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.
Manheim 6 hours ago||
I find this article strange in its logic. If the use of AI generated content is problematic as a principle I can understand the conflict. Then no AI should be used to "transcribe and interpret a video" at all - period. But if the concern is accuracy in the AI "transcript" and not the support from AI as such, isn't it a good thing that the AI generated text is deleted after the officer has processed the text and finalized their report?

That said, I believe it is important to aknowlegde the fact that human memory, experience and interpretation of "what really happened" is flawed, isn't that why the body cameras are in use in the first place? If everyone believed police officers already where able to recall the absolute thruth of everything that happens in situations, why bother with the cameras?

Personally I do not think it is a good idea to use AI to write full police reports based on body camera recordings. However, as a support in the same way the video recordings are available, why not? If, in the future, AI will write accurate "body cam" based reports I would not have any problems with it as long as the video is still available to be checked. A full report should, in my opinion, always contain additional contextual info from the police involved and witnesses to add what the camera recordings not necessarily reflect or contain.

DangitBobby 1 hour ago||
The EFF's angle is that the police can use an LLM's initial report maliciously to 1) let incriminating inaccuracies generated by the LLM stand or 2) fabricate incriminating inaccuracies. Afterwards, because the LLM generated the initial report, the officer would have plausible deniability to say they themselves didn't intentionally lie, they were just negligent in editing the initial report. So it's about accountability washing.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 6 hours ago|||
My worry is at scale AI from one vendor can introduce biases. We wont know what those biases are. But whatever they are the same bias affects all reports.
Manheim 5 hours ago||
That is something to worry about, agreed. So, the quality and the reliance of AI is what we should focus on. In addition we should be able to keep track (and records of) how AI has used and build its narrative and conclutions.
Hikikomori 1 hour ago||
>That said, I believe it is important to aknowlegde the fact that human memory, experience and interpretation of "what really happened" is flawed, isn't that why the body cameras are in use in the first place? If everyone believed police officers already where able to recall the absolute thruth of everything that happens in situations, why bother with the cameras?

Police tend to not tell the truth, on purpose.

wyldfire 8 hours ago||
> important first step in reigning in AI police reports.

That should be 'reining in'. "Reign" is -- ironically - - what monarchs do.

DetectDefect 8 hours ago|
Such innocent mistakes make me smile these days because it gives assurance a real human wrote them.
lithocarpus 7 hours ago|||
Don't worry sufficiently advanced LLMs will learn how to put in the right amount of typoes to be convincing.
bgbntty2 7 hours ago|||
It's not certain that LLMs don't do this already—it's likely their doing this even now.
jondwillis 6 hours ago|||
That’s —— not just —— possible— it’s —— ——— probable!!!
techdmn 51 minutes ago||
I read this phrase in a Spiderman comic, probably 1990 +/- 5 years. If memory serves Harry Osborne said it to Peter Parker, something regarding Norman Osborne's activity as the Green Goblin. Anyway, it's one of those phases that immediately etched itself into my brain and replays itself whenever the situation seems appropriate. I've always wondered if the quote had a more respectable original source, but haven't been able to find one.
fortran77 6 hours ago|||
Are you an LLM that misspelled “they’re” intentionally?
bgbntty2 6 hours ago||
That was the joke. Also the use of the "It's not; it's" structure and the em-dash.
BoxOfRain 3 hours ago||||
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.
antonvs 1 hour ago|||
*typos

Oh you got me

cyberax 7 hours ago|||
Unless it's an LLM instructed to make occasional mistakes.
0x_rs 5 hours ago||
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/watch?v=B9M4F_U1eEw

avidiax 8 hours ago||
This does sound problematic, but if a police officer's report contradicts the body-worn camera or other evidence, it already undermines their credibility, whether they blame AI or not. My impression is that police don't usually face repercussions for inaccuracies or outright lying in court.

> 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

The bigger issue, that the article doesn't cover, is that police officers may not carefully review the AI generated report, and then when appearing in court months or years later, will testify to whatever is in the report, accurate or not. So the issue is that the officer doesn't contradict inaccuracies in the report.

parineum 7 hours ago|
> My impression is that police don't usually face repercussions for inaccuracies or outright lying in court.

That's because it's a very difficult thing to prove. Bad memories and even completely false memories are real things.

BrenBarn 7 hours ago|||
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).
lostnground 6 hours ago||
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 producing better officers
tialaramex 3 hours ago|||
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.

BrenBarn 3 hours ago||||
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.
awesome_dude 5 hours ago|||
This is an outrageous lie, there were SEVEN Police Academy movies!!!
loeg 6 hours ago|||
Sure, but other court participants are given somewhat less grace for lying under oath.
parineum 6 hours ago||
Are they?

Perjury isn't a commonly prosecuted crime.

sylos 6 hours ago|||
If an officer misremembers something about you, you go to jail . If you misremember something about the event, you also go to jail. Yeah, I guess it tracks
loeg 6 hours ago||||
That's why I qualified it with "somewhat."
cwmoore 5 hours ago|||
Neither is grace a common defense.
bushbaba 4 hours ago||
To me it’s a question of it they are on average better. It’s not like human based input is perfect either.
intended 7 hours ago||
> In July of this year, EFF published a two-part report on how Axon designed Draft One to defy transparency. Police upload their body-worn camera’s audio into the system, the system generates a report that the officer is expected to edit, and then the officer exports the report. But when they do that, Draft One erases the initial draft, and with it any evidence of what portions of the report were written by AI and what portions were written by an officer. 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.” Draft One is designed to make it hard to disprove that.

> Axon’s senior principal product manager for generative AI is asked (at the 49:47 mark) whether or not it’s possible to see after-the-fact which parts of the report were suggested by the AI and which were edited by the officer. His response (bold and definition of RMS added):

“So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices.

Policing and Hallucinations. Can’t wait to see this replicated globally.

taneq 4 hours ago|
Does the officer not take full ownership of the report once they edit it? If they got an intern to write a report and then they signed off on it, they’d be responsible, right?
benatkin 6 hours ago|
The experiments of AI agents sending emails to grown-ups are good I think – AIs are doing much more dangerous stuff like these AI Police Reports. I don't think making a fuss over every agent-sent email is going to cause other AI incursion into our society to slow down. The Police Report writer is a non-human partially autonomous participant like a K9 officer. It's wishful thinking that AIs aren't going to be set loose doing jobs. The cat is out of the bag.
dannersy 5 hours ago|
I'm curious about this claim. What about agents sending emails to each other is good?
More comments...