8 ms·

Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements

158 points by nmstoker 3mo ago

andy_ppp 3mo ago
I’m even seeing colleagues using AI slop instead of writing responses on Slack/Teams… I have no idea if I should call out this behaviour, usually I have been saying “finding the above text difficult to parse” followed by a yes/no question seems to get me closer the the answers I need but it’s excruciating to work like this.
echelon_musk 3mo ago
At nearly £500 a year is an FT subscription worth it? Am I going to get invaluable stock tips that will cover the sub?!
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  The price is set for people who will expense it to their employers.
- lloydatkinson 3mo ago
  https://archive.ph/RzP91 https://archive.ph/RzP91
- cjs_ac 3mo ago
  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.
  - skippyboxedhero 3mo ago
    The FT is a paper read by people who don't work in finance assuming that people in finance read it. It hasn't been relevant in finance or even business for many years now. You can also tell this from the comments section which has, like the paper, turned into establishment/"centrist dad" central. WSJ and Bloomberg took a lot of the top markets/companies people almost a decade ago now (Andrea Felstead was one, genuinely someone who knew UK retail very well). The majority of the remaining columnists either worked in politics or are politics-adjacent. There is almost no detailed finance market coverage. The UK companies stuff was spun out into the Shares magazine 20 years ago. The FT reflects British society, nothing could be more grubby than becoming involved in commerce. Many of the people who moved up and out go into political journalism because that is high status (i.e. Peston). The FT also has a nasty habit of creating special jobs for people if they are high status enough (Kuper is one, Keynes is the new one, there are many more). The FT is a basically unreformed backwater that is a bit like it was 80s, nothing has really changed. I know a few people who work there in undemanding roles (every couple of weeks attending an expenses paid dinner with a celebrity) and got their job through nepotism. It isn't like anywhere else in UK business or even journalism because of the corporate subscription revenue, the editor is able to run it like a fief. To give specific examples: Chris Giles is somewhat notorious for being a complete hack. If you are somewhat familiar with how news is made, you should be able to read his stories and work out exactly what conversations led to that story being written. In many cases it is Giles talking to someone adjacent to or in politics. Martin Wolf is a complete dinosaur, if he writes a column you can predict exactly what his take will be because he hasn't had a new idea since 1990. JBM is probably the only journalist who actually writes interesting things, these things however often seem to be conflicted with his personal interests/conversations with civil servants. Stuart Kirk...how does he have a column? Barely worked in markets, somehow the markets guy. Shrimsley, politics guy. Cavendish, worked for Cameron. Beattie, basically a Martin Wolf-lite. Pilita Clark, Lidl Kellaway. It goes on and on. Ineffectual posh people with the most anodyne, pro-establishment positions boring everyone to death with their thoughts. Exceptions: Lucy Kellaway, long gone now but she was very good (nothing to do with business or finance though, more social commentary). Janen Ganesh, also good (again, social commentary). In actual business or finance...nothing interesting. John Lee was quite interesting. MSW was somewhat interesting but also said catastrophically incorrect things often...but she was good for marketing if you started a fund and actually was primarily a fund management journalist (although at the FT she often strayed into politics). Also, a special mention for Lionel Barber...admitted to leaking stories to traders in a documentary, there are multiple laws against this in the UK, never charged, never investigated. A lot of what changed with the paper happened because of Barber and his opinions on things like Brexit where he interpreted the role of the FT as being a political activist first. Same thing has happened at the Economist when Micklethwait left, the lure of politics and being culturally relevant is too strong. Lex is also useless. They had some decent people there writing on niche topics. But after the incident with Barber/Wirecard, there has been a big change in how that part of the world works. Many years ago, you would call up someone from Lex to leak a fake M&A rumour and (if you gave them something real later) they would "leak" it (this was confirmed publicly in the Operation Tabernula trial, this is why many papers have pulled back completely on any market-adjacent coverage...afaik, Mark Kleinman is basically the only person trying to do this stuff anymore and it is a million miles from what it once was).
- phyalow 3mo ago
  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…
  - layer8 3mo ago
    How much did you pay for grad school? ;)
    - _gmax0 3mo ago
      If not for taxpayers, the opportunity cost would be incalculably immense.
- zipy124 3mo ago
  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.
- boelboel 3mo ago
  It's worth it for me with the physical paper. I don't think you'll get any valuable tips but the reporting is moderately better than other papers. Gives me something to do instead of immediately picking up my phone.
  - boelboel 3mo ago
    I only pay 25-30 a month though, wouldn't be worth it at 50.
- almostkindatech 3mo ago
  Strangely enough, you can get it cheaper (in £ at least) by signing up to a paid Revolut account and getting the FT sub for free.
embedding-shape 3mo ago
> [...] 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.
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago
  > 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
  - gdulli 3mo ago
    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.
  - skydhash 3mo ago
    That’s why most people that says LLM doesn’t work. It’s not that it can’t produce a good output once in a while, it’s that you can’t guarantee it. Or reduce the risks of a bad output. It’s a chaotic element and the cost of being alert enough to ensure consistency (if it’s feasible at all) is higher than just doing without. But AI proponents are more than happier to brandish carefully curated anecdotes than to do a systematic study of risks and impacts.
tgv 3mo ago
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.
- dylan604 3mo ago
  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.
  - tgv 3mo ago
    What's kept us going in the past then? Was it really just poverty?
    - Henchman21 3mo ago
      We are apex predators. We are meant to be lazy. Ever see a lion fill out a TPS report? Of course not, they lay around, eat, make babies, and sleep. Couple it with a society in which nothing really matters no one really cares? Well that’s what we have now.
techblueberry 3mo ago
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?
delichon 3mo ago
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, with less work, and including body language, we should. And video is more AI tamper evident than text.
spacebacon 3mo ago
[flagged]
AJRF 3mo ago
If you listen closely to UK cabinet ministers you can intuit that they are being horse whispered into handing over vast sums of taxpayer money to firms for AI who are promising solutions to the productivity gap (chasm?) that the UK is plagued by. I can say with certainty lots of money will be spent, and the gap will not be filled. I would bet my life on it.
willXare 3mo ago
[flagged]

158 points by nmstoker 3mo ago

I’m even seeing colleagues using AI slop instead of writing responses on Slack/Teams… I have no idea if I should call out this behaviour, usually I have been saying “finding the above text difficult to parse” followed by a yes/no question seems to get me closer the the answers I need but it’s excruciating to work like this.

echelon_musk 3mo ago

At nearly £500 a year is an FT subscription worth it? Am I going to get invaluable stock tips that will cover the sub?!

Aurornis 3mo ago
The price is set for people who will expense it to their employers.
lloydatkinson 3mo ago
https://archive.ph/RzP91 https://archive.ph/RzP91
cjs_ac 3mo ago
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.
- skippyboxedhero 3mo ago
  The FT is a paper read by people who don't work in finance assuming that people in finance read it. It hasn't been relevant in finance or even business for many years now. You can also tell this from the comments section which has, like the paper, turned into establishment/"centrist dad" central. WSJ and Bloomberg took a lot of the top markets/companies people almost a decade ago now (Andrea Felstead was one, genuinely someone who knew UK retail very well). The majority of the remaining columnists either worked in politics or are politics-adjacent. There is almost no detailed finance market coverage. The UK companies stuff was spun out into the Shares magazine 20 years ago. The FT reflects British society, nothing could be more grubby than becoming involved in commerce. Many of the people who moved up and out go into political journalism because that is high status (i.e. Peston). The FT also has a nasty habit of creating special jobs for people if they are high status enough (Kuper is one, Keynes is the new one, there are many more). The FT is a basically unreformed backwater that is a bit like it was 80s, nothing has really changed. I know a few people who work there in undemanding roles (every couple of weeks attending an expenses paid dinner with a celebrity) and got their job through nepotism. It isn't like anywhere else in UK business or even journalism because of the corporate subscription revenue, the editor is able to run it like a fief. To give specific examples: Chris Giles is somewhat notorious for being a complete hack. If you are somewhat familiar with how news is made, you should be able to read his stories and work out exactly what conversations led to that story being written. In many cases it is Giles talking to someone adjacent to or in politics. Martin Wolf is a complete dinosaur, if he writes a column you can predict exactly what his take will be because he hasn't had a new idea since 1990. JBM is probably the only journalist who actually writes interesting things, these things however often seem to be conflicted with his personal interests/conversations with civil servants. Stuart Kirk...how does he have a column? Barely worked in markets, somehow the markets guy. Shrimsley, politics guy. Cavendish, worked for Cameron. Beattie, basically a Martin Wolf-lite. Pilita Clark, Lidl Kellaway. It goes on and on. Ineffectual posh people with the most anodyne, pro-establishment positions boring everyone to death with their thoughts. Exceptions: Lucy Kellaway, long gone now but she was very good (nothing to do with business or finance though, more social commentary). Janen Ganesh, also good (again, social commentary). In actual business or finance...nothing interesting. John Lee was quite interesting. MSW was somewhat interesting but also said catastrophically incorrect things often...but she was good for marketing if you started a fund and actually was primarily a fund management journalist (although at the FT she often strayed into politics). Also, a special mention for Lionel Barber...admitted to leaking stories to traders in a documentary, there are multiple laws against this in the UK, never charged, never investigated. A lot of what changed with the paper happened because of Barber and his opinions on things like Brexit where he interpreted the role of the FT as being a political activist first. Same thing has happened at the Economist when Micklethwait left, the lure of politics and being culturally relevant is too strong. Lex is also useless. They had some decent people there writing on niche topics. But after the incident with Barber/Wirecard, there has been a big change in how that part of the world works. Many years ago, you would call up someone from Lex to leak a fake M&A rumour and (if you gave them something real later) they would "leak" it (this was confirmed publicly in the Operation Tabernula trial, this is why many papers have pulled back completely on any market-adjacent coverage...afaik, Mark Kleinman is basically the only person trying to do this stuff anymore and it is a million miles from what it once was).
phyalow 3mo ago
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…
- layer8 3mo ago
  How much did you pay for grad school? ;)
  - _gmax0 3mo ago
    If not for taxpayers, the opportunity cost would be incalculably immense.
zipy124 3mo ago
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.
boelboel 3mo ago
It's worth it for me with the physical paper. I don't think you'll get any valuable tips but the reporting is moderately better than other papers. Gives me something to do instead of immediately picking up my phone.
- boelboel 3mo ago
  I only pay 25-30 a month though, wouldn't be worth it at 50.
almostkindatech 3mo ago
Strangely enough, you can get it cheaper (in £ at least) by signing up to a paid Revolut account and getting the FT sub for free.

embedding-shape 3mo ago

> [...] 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.

bluefirebrand 3mo ago
> 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
- gdulli 3mo ago
  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.
- skydhash 3mo ago
  That’s why most people that says LLM doesn’t work. It’s not that it can’t produce a good output once in a while, it’s that you can’t guarantee it. Or reduce the risks of a bad output. It’s a chaotic element and the cost of being alert enough to ensure consistency (if it’s feasible at all) is higher than just doing without. But AI proponents are more than happier to brandish carefully curated anecdotes than to do a systematic study of risks and impacts.

tgv 3mo ago

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.

dylan604 3mo ago
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.
- tgv 3mo ago
  What's kept us going in the past then? Was it really just poverty?
  - Henchman21 3mo ago
    We are apex predators. We are meant to be lazy. Ever see a lion fill out a TPS report? Of course not, they lay around, eat, make babies, and sleep. Couple it with a society in which nothing really matters no one really cares? Well that’s what we have now.

techblueberry 3mo ago

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?

delichon 3mo ago

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, with less work, and including body language, we should. And video is more AI tamper evident than text.

spacebacon 3mo ago

[flagged]

AJRF 3mo ago

If you listen closely to UK cabinet ministers you can intuit that they are being horse whispered into handing over vast sums of taxpayer money to firms for AI who are promising solutions to the productivity gap (chasm?) that the UK is plagued by. I can say with certainty lots of money will be spent, and the gap will not be filled. I would bet my life on it.

willXare 3mo ago

[flagged]