Comment by Manheim

9 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.

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.

  • 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.

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.

>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.