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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

The main thing that keeps me from using AI for things like document summaries is that it regularly trips up on the nuances in logic – mistaking positives and negatives when multiple points are being discussed, misattribution of motivation, etc. I can't think of a much worse thing for this to be used for than police reports.

You could say that because the bodycam footage still exists it won't be a problem, but the point of these reports is for decisions to be made based on them without needing to review the full footage. People are going to get dragged through court based on this, and if they're lucky, come out with thousands spent in legal bills to get someone to just review the bodycam footage where they said the opposite to the report.

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Humans make the same mistakes when writing up reports too. I'm curious which is more reliable.

For example, I've done interviews for various media outlets and often enough they report I said the opposite of what I said, similar to the reasons you mentioned above.

> interviews for various media outlets

Errors then are not an accident. They start the interview with a conclusion to get to, whatever you say will be cut and pasted to push the narrative.

I hate when they do that. They're always out to get me. They're tricky like that. They have evil agendas. Damn them.

> Humans make the same mistakes when writing up reports too

Sure, but then again humans are all independent and biased in different ways while the automated tools we replace them with will be making the same mistake and using the same bias over and over again.

One is a single entity, the other is a multitude of independent entities.

My suggestion is that humans are still noticeably better at this, not least because humans are able to backtrack and re-adjust their interpretations, which LLMs cannot in the same way. An LLM's "thought process" and "output" are essentially the same thing.

Now maybe I'm wrong about this, but even if so I think it's still a risky change. We have understood human error for pretty much all of recorded history. We have a very poor understanding of computer error, to the point that there are some legal systems where computer software is assumed to be correct by default.

Courts and laws around the world are designed to cope with humans making mistakes and lying.

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