Southern Maine police are testing new AI software to write their police reports
Summary
Portland police are taking a “low and slow” approach, said Maj. Jason King, waiting to see how other agencies and courts across the country reckon with this tech before deciding to use it in potentially high-profile criminal prosecutions. Because large language models like GPT-4 are trained by people with their own biases, sometimes they produce content that can be harmful toward certain communities, said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “It doesn’t make sense to throw them into the middle of the criminal justice system, and the concern is, injustices will result.” Axon’s team used the Open AI model to generate “realistic” police report narratives and then fed it to the Draft One software to train it, according to a spokesperson. “It’s only going to take one careless officer and one error to potentially blow up the entire system based on AI-generated police reports.” Zerillo, the defense attorney, said that while he discourages this use of AI, auditing the reports is a first step. “Yet, we don’t seem like we’ve ever learned that lesson.” Adams said that while police departments shouldn’t have to wait for researchers to identify every consequence of this technology before implementing it, they should set goals to review whether it’s actually doing what they had hoped.