It’s fine to not understand what “AI” is and how it works
That's highly presumptive isn't it? I didn't make any statement about what AI is, or the mechanics behind it. I only made a statement regarding the owners and operators of AI. We're talking about the politics of using AI to aid in police accountability, and for those intents and purposes, AI need not be more than a black box. We could call it a sentient jar of kidney beans for all it matters.
So for the sake of argument - the one I made, not the one I didn't make - what did I misunderstand?
Unreliable
On June 22, 2023, Judge P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York released a lengthy order sanctioning two attorneys for submitting a brief drafted by ChatGPT. Judge Castel reprimanded the attorneys, explaining that while “there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” the attorneys “abandoned their responsibilities” by submitting a brief littered with fake judicial opinions, quotes, and citations.
Judge Castel’s opinion offers a detailed analysis of one such opinion, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd., 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019), which the sanctioned lawyers produced to the Court. The Varghese decision is presented as being issued by three Eleventh Circuit judges. While according to Judge Castel’s opinion the decision “shows stylistic and reasoning flaws that do not generally appear in decisions issued by the United States Court of Appeals,” and contains a legal analysis that is otherwise “gibberish,” it does in fact reference some real cases. Additionally, when confronted with the question of whether the case is real, the AI platform itself doubles down, explaining that the case “does indeed exist and can be found on legal research databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis.”
Regardless of how ChatGPT made this error, be it "hallucination" or otherwise, I would submit this as exhibit A that AI, at least currently, is not reliable enough to do legal analysis.
Beholden to corporate interests
Most of the large, large language models are owned and run by huge corporations: OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, Microsoft's Copilot, etc. It is already almost impossible to hold these organizations accountable for their misdeeds, so how can we trust their creations to police the police?
The naive "at-best" scenario is that AI trained to identify unjustified police shootings sometimes fails to identify them properly. Some go unreported. Or perhaps it reports a "justified" police shooting (I am not here to debate that definition but let's say they occur) as unjustified, which gums up other investigation efforts.
The more conspiratorial "at-worst" scenario is that a company with a pro-cop/thin-blue-line sympathizing culture could easily sweep damning reports made by their AI under the rug, which facilitates aggressive police behavior under the guise of "monitoring" it.
As reported by ProPublica, Patterson PD has a contract with a Chicago-based software company called Truleo to examine audio from bodycam videos to identify problematic behavior by officers. The company charges around $50,000 per year for flagging several types of behaviors, such as when officers use force, interrupt civilians, use profanities, or turn off their cameras while on active duty. The company claims that its data shows such behaviors often lead to violent escalation.
How does Truleo determine what is "risky" behavior, what is an "interruption" to a civilian? What is a profanity? Does Truleo consider "crap" to be a profanity? More importantly, what if you disagree with Truleo's definitions? What recourse do you have against a company that has zero duty to protect you? If you file a lawsuit alleging officer misconduct, can Truleo's AI's conclusions be admissible as evidence, and can it be used against you?