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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I think the right balance is one of liability. There is a person responsible and can be creative as to how he creates the report. But if there is something wrong with the report, he would be responsible same as if he wrote the report himself.

I for one welcome new technology to reduce human error and biases.

This I don't understand:

> He said automating those reports will “ease the police’s ability to harass, surveil and inflict violence on community members. While making the cop’s job easier, it makes Black and brown people’s lives harder.”

This premise is anything that makes a police officers job easier means they can do more policing, which equates to making the lives of some people worse?

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There is a valid point that in a society where police have broad immunity and little oversight, the requirement to do paperwork sometimes serves a purpose in introducing enough friction to moderate the capriciousness of initiating an interaction. If you have to do paperwork you are more likely to reserve paperwork-generating actions for situations that truly warrant it. Making that a push-button process means that the “fun part” of apprehending someone and exerting power over them has less downside and may happen even when it’s unnecessary.

The flip side of that is, what the cop thinks warrants paperwork is different from what citizens think warrants paperwork.

Cops will often gaslight victims of crimes in an attempt to not have to do paperwork. I witnessed a man attempt to steal a car while the owner was unloading supplies into his store (a pizza place in NYC). He failed to steal it only because he couldn't get it into gear(a manual transmission), and probably damaged the clutch a bit.

when the cops showed up, it was clear the cops did not want to write it up, and went as far to accuse the owner of lying(and actual phrase said by the cops: "how do we know you didn't say he could sit in your car?", and threatening him with making a false report, or assaulting the thief by holding him until the cops showed up if he pushed it.

Of course, there could be other reasons for not doing it. Maybe they're under pressure from their commander to not take crime reports so the crime rate appears lower in the neighborhood than it actually is. But I assumed it was garden variety professional laziness.

I don't think an LLM will fix the problem of a police officer who only enforces the law at their leisure. For all we know, the thief was their nephew or an informant, and the officer was deliberately protecting them.

Sure, but it removes the "I don't want to do paperwork" as one of the reasons why a victim might be ignored by a cop. Assuming LLMs actually save cops time on paperwork

Let's not swallow a cat to chase a fly. I'm sure LLMs could help police by for instance, providing a semantic search capability in a document retrieval system. I could see that working a lot better than fuzzy search in some cases (instead of searching for "Robert," "Rob," "Bob," etc, maybe you could identify messages about Robert. With enough context, maybe you could even do this with a message where they weren't mentioned by name.).

But writing police reports is a nuts and bolts idea liable to introduce way worse problems than what it purports to solve.

Even if this did free up an officer's time, it's not guaranteed that would go to better policing. The department might see it as license to create heavier processes and more paperwork. These reporting requirements don't come out of nowhere, there are strong incentives to create visibility and accountability and they won't disappear if you make paperwork cheaper.

> This premise is anything that makes a police officers job easier means they can do more policing, which equates to making the lives of some people worse?

If policing has a net negative impact on some people's lives, more policing will be more negative. I can get behind that.

Also, what's with "Black and brown"? Why is only one capitalized?

It was handed down to us from on high(The AP, I think) a few years ago that Black had unique cultural and social aspects in America that necessitated the capitalization, whereas white or brown did not.

Of course, the reasoning was just thrown out almost immediately and all previously black people are now Black, regardless of those social or cultural reasons. For example, the AP will label any black person in America as Black, even if they have no shared cultural or social experience in America with people who are descended from slaves(ie a black Nigerian arriving in NYC yesterday is now Black)

> If policing has a net negative impact on some people's lives

I think the problem is that this premise itself is a big pill to swallow. Do people really believe this to be the case? I'm a minority who holds a severe dislike for cops in general, but I don't think this is something I'd ever agree with.

I don't live in the US, but I can say that interactions with the police are unlikely to be positive for me. I'm sure that, as a general body, they have a positive societal impact, but any one interaction is unlikely to have a positive effect to the people they interact with.

Eg if my house gets burgled, they'll never find anything, but they have hassled me for laughing at something unrelated because they thought I was laughing at them.

> new technology to reduce human error and biases

If the meaningful choices have been made before the AI is engaged -- which seems likely -- then this might have the opposite effect. For example, a few years back one of my coworkers was arrested on a domestic violence complaint. We searched up the charges and were surprised to find an extremely lurid and descriptive account -- right alongside a dozen other identical-but-for-the-name accounts for others arrested on domestic violence complaints that night. Clearly the local police department just had a "domestic violence template" into which they dropped peoples' names without much thought. This level of carelessness would have been much less obvious if they had a LLM change up the details each time.

> There is a person responsible and can be creative as to how he creates the report. But if there is something wrong with the report, he would be responsible same as if he wrote the report himself.

What does "responsible" mean here? How good are we currently at holding police "responsible" for incorrect reports?

This seems like a moral hazard. I believe most police officers want to be good people, and since writing a truthful report by hand is easier than writing a lie (why bother making up a lie?) most reports are truthful.

But, if a LLM makes it easier to just fill in bullshit--and LLMs are very very good at filling in bullshit, if nothing else--then there is a moral hazard. Police will have a personal incentive to allow LLM fluff in their reports.

> I think the right balance is one of liability.

Human liabilities for what they do with LLMs is also a question when it comes to defamation/libel/slander.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4546063

> I for one welcome new technology to reduce human error and biases.

That assumes the technology does not contain those very biases, which we know is exactly what happens with LLMs. Maybe Axon have fair and unbiased datasets but unless they are forced to reveal that in court, no one will ever know.

I think its easier to program LLMs than humans. You can change the dataset, or have explicit prompts to remove biases.

Just look at how Google got their LLMs to re-imagine the founding fathers to remove bias.

> You can change the dataset

To what though? Datasets are not easy to create - why do you think they are almost all based on archives of stolen books and videos? Is Axon really going to spend millions to curate billions of words of English conversations free of racial bias for example? The same goes for voice recognition. Is the model for a woman with a thick regional accent ever going to be as good as a man speaking British English without significant investment?

> Just look at how Google got their LLMs to re-imagine the founding fathers to remove bias.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not since it is such a perfect example of unintended consequences and hubris.

Again, easier to do prompt engineering than to engineer humans. The human also hears the thick regional accent. At least with computers you can control the medium or what they are aware of (maybe normalize the voice, or convert to text).

Every example of bias I can imagine is infinitely more difficult to address with humans than AI models.

Beauracracy as the active ingredient

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/30/bureaucracy-as-active-...

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