Hacker News

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

46 points by nmstoker 2 hours ago | 10 comments

> [...] 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.

kerabatsos 11 minutes ago

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.

bluefirebrand 13 minutes 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

echelon_musk 34 minutes 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?!

cjs_ac 24 minutes 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.

phyalow 21 minutes 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 18 minutes ago

How much did you pay for grad school? ;)

zipy124 14 minutes 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.

lloydatkinson 29 minutes ago

https://archive.ph/RzP91

tgv 10 minutes 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.