AI-generated police report turned cop into a frog: we laugh, but it’s a problem

AI use across police departments in America has been steadily expanding, with sometimes comedic results. In Heber City, Utah, cops had to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow turned into a frog.

The US law enforcement agencies boast that using AI tools is saving officers time. Maybe. However, mistakes, for instance, while drafting a police report, can cost innocent people significantly more.

The freshest example, thankfully, hasn’t been harmful to anyone, except, perhaps, the reputation of frogs.

As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, an AI program that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.

That’s obviously not true, and the explanation is quite simple. The tool – not so smart after all – seems to have picked up on some unrelated background chatter and incorporated it into the report.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,’” police sergeant Rick Keel explained to the broadcaster.

“That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports,” the officer almost modestly added.

The AI-powered software, Draft One, automatically generates reports from police body camera footage. It uses OpenAI’s large language models.

The aim is to reduce the amount of paperwork, but if mistakes such as the one in Heber City are common, officers are likely spending even more time double-checking the reports.

And if they’re not, mistakes – sometimes called hallucinations (even though that must sound hurtful to individuals who actually hallucinate) – can make their way into important documents.

“I am concerned that automation and the ease of the technology would cause police officers to be sort of less careful with their writing,” American University law professor Andrew Ferguson told the Associated Press recently.

Besides, the tool could be used to introduce deniability and make cops less accountable if mistakes were to fall through the cracks.

It’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer,

The Electronic Frontier Foundation.

An Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) investigation from last year found that Draft One “seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public.”

“It’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer,” wrote the EFF.

“Axon (the company behind Draft One) and its customers claim this technology will revolutionize policing, but it remains to be seen how it will change the criminal justice system, and who this technology benefits most.”

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