8 ms·

Axon’s Draft One is designed to defy transparency

255 points by zdw 1y ago

surbas 1y ago
Wonder if OpenAI has all the originals, especially in light of that lawsuit with nytimes.
- chaps 1y ago
  If so, it'd definitely be FOIA'able.
  - brookst 1y ago
    I don’t think FOIA applies to private companies, only government records.
    - qingcharles 1y ago
      Not correct. All FOIA laws that I know of say that any records created or held by private corporations under contract to the government are FOIA-able via the government. (the government has to go out and get the records for you)
      - chaps 1y ago
        Yep! Here's Illinois's statutory language on this topic: (2) A public record that is not in the possession of a public body but is in the possession of a party with whom the agency has contracted to perform a governmental function on behalf of the public body, and that directly relates to the governmental function and is not otherwise exempt under this Act, shall be considered a public record of the public body, for purposes of this Act. The nuance is in the definitional limitations/vagueness of "directly relates to the governmental function".
        qingcharles 1y ago
        Yeah, my bad, I forgot the extra clause. And, of course, you often have to fight even harder for these types of records as it is extra work for the government to do, as chaps above can surely attest. Some stuff slips through, though. For instance, I tried to FOIA the source code for the Voyager probes, but NASA outsourced the dev to Caltech and somehow there is a copyright restriction on it, or something daft like that, which means it cannot be released, even though taxpayers paid the bills.
- dylan604 1y ago
  From TFA, “ You can read our full report, which details what we found in those documents, how we filed those public records requests, and how you can file your own, here.” With the last word here being a link to another article: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/effs-guide-getting-records-about-axons-ai-generated-police-reports https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/effs-guide-getting-rec...
- dmead 1y ago
  Their models run on Microsoft models and on azure.
asah 1y ago
The real issue is accountability - officers need to be held accountable for reports the way pilots are accountable for use of auto-pilot[1]. [1] yes they are: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+pilots+accountable+for+use+of+auto-pilot https://www.google.com/search?q=are+pilots+accountable+for+u...
- adriand 1y ago
  That’s really just one issue among many, and it actually makes me worry more about this technology, not less: it provides a clear incentive for the officer to stand by the contents of a report that he or she did not write, even if they realize at some point it is wrong, because they hastily or lazily signed it. The way this technology is designed is a clear example of dystopian outcomes driven by market forces: capitalism inserted into processes (like justice) which society ought to protect against perversion by profit motives. I can imagine a version of this technology that is designed with societal benefits in mind, but instead we get one designed to make the sale.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    Here's the thing. I've read thousands of police reports. Most police reports are super short and super vague. Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Most criminal charges result in plea deals. Most defendants will never see any evidence against them before pleading guilty†. If, in the exceptionally rare case that a defendant goes to trial, an officer has to testify, it is probably on average a year after he wrote the report. He will be sat down just before trial by the prosecutor and shown his report and asked to read it. On the stand he generally will not have his report available to reference and is supposed to use his memory, but this will be corrupted by his reading of whatever is in the report he read a couple of hours before. If his report is full of inaccuracies he will almost certainly testify under oath to those. †This situation has changed very slightly in the last few years with lawyers now supposed to verify the probable guilt of their client before recommending a guilty plea.
    - FireBeyond 1y ago
mycall 1y ago
It should matter which parts were written by AI or by officer. Once the officer signs off on the report, they take full responsibility for the content.
- zdw 1y ago
  Do you read EULAs all the way through every time? People just LGTM rubber stamp nearly everything they're given, as it's time efficient in the now.
  - tqi 1y ago
    Do you think there is a difference between a civilian driver ignoring the routine maintenance schedule for their car and a professional pilot ignoring the maintenance schedule for their plane?
  - 9dev 1y ago
    That’s absolutely their choice, then. But if it turns out the AI wrote bullshit into the report, the officer that rubber stamped it must be held accountable for that, with no difference to a situation where they had written the bullshit themselves.
    - gpm 1y ago
      "Responsibility" doesn't help the person who goes to prison based on the "evidence" of the bullshit report that the jury decided to believe. Or the person who goes to prison when the bullshit report should have exonerated them, but didn't. Or in the other direction entirely a victim whose abuser goes free because of the bullshit in the report. Ultimately accuracy in police reports is a high stakes endeavour, it's not a place to be putting bullshit generators.
- conartist6 1y ago
  I can only assume you meant to write "shouldn't" instead of "should", but if you study human factors you'll discover that certain kinds of taking-shortcuts behavior are inevitable when dealing with humans. Speeding when we drive, for example. We know we are creating a material risk of getting pulled over and fined, but we just basically decide to ignore that risk because for most of us it is outweighed by the convenience (and real value) of getting everywhere we're going faster. As always considering how a person would interact with an intern is surprisingly instructive to how they will form a working relationship with an non-sentient tool like a language model. You would expect them to give it a probationary experience to earn their trust after which if they are satisfied they will almost certainly express that trust by giving the tool a greater and greater degree of freedom with less active (and less critical) oversight. It is not the initial state that worries me where the officers still mistrust a new technology and are vigilant of it. What worries me is the late-stage where they have learned to trust it (because it has learned to cover their asses correctly) and the AI itself actually ends up exercising power in human social structures because people have a surprising bias towards not speaking up when it would be safer to keep your head down and go with the flow, even when the flow is letting AI take operational control of society inch by inch
Ralfp 1y ago
Having picked a habit of watching propable cause proceedings on YouTube, I wonder if this is simply result of real reports that AI was trained on being purposefully obtuse and laconic to give prosecutors a wiggle space in the court room?
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  Are you talking about Judge Fleischer in Texas? I do enjoy seeing those (well, I shouldn't). The prosecutors are given the most absolute trash reports to work with. "Failure to ID, after a traffic stop." "What was the stop for?" "It doesn't say." "So no PC for the stop." "A caller and said she thought someone was stealing their neighbor's U Haul. A man was observed walking on that street and taken into custody for ..." "For what? Walking while black?" But no sympathy for the prosecutors either. Garbage reports, but they obviously don't read them pre-hearing, and have plainly become accustomed to judges rubber stamping their PC hearings. I do like that he doesn't go 'lightly' with the defendants. "You got off lucky this time. You know it, I know it. Do better or it might not go the same next time", and when there is PC or other such, he doesn't put up with any bullshit either. More judges like him are needed.
  - drewbeck 1y ago
    His patronizing tone to the defendants is the one thing I can’t stand about him. Telling some kid who did nothing wrong and was pulled over for no reason “be careful” is bs. What else should the kid do? They already were doing nothing wrong.
    - Ralfp 1y ago
      My favorite explanation for this is "Everything you say can and will be used against you. So why talk if you are winning?".
      - FireBeyond 1y ago
        He has literally said this. The judge was berating the prosecutor, defendant puts his hand up, "Judge, can I say something?" He looks at him. "Are you winning right now?" "Yeah..." "Then you don't say anything."
csujoy 1y ago
our officers don’t have time to comb through every transcript, fixing it for privacy, empathy, and all that. But keeping the transcripts is still a big win: more info in police records can make police officers more data-driven :)
causal 1y ago
I think such a tool could be useful for ensuring all the facts get included, but I hate the idea that some departments could start highering illiterate officers if this tech goes far enough.
- viraptor 1y ago
  > could start highering illiterate officers I love this mistake.
  - causal 1y ago
    Heh. Gonna leave it then
  - alganet 1y ago
    Can you elaborate a little bit more?
    - teamspirit 1y ago
      “Highering” should be “hiring”
      - alganet 1y ago
        I asked for viraptor's elaboration on what he thinks of it. Thanks for your perspective though.
        jameshart 1y ago
        Normally people don’t come back to explain a joke, because it ruins it.
        alganet 1y ago
        One could say "it's a joke", without explaining it, thus, not ruining it. Also, saying some vague shit and then claiming it as a joke is very convenient. Finally, police injustice is not a subject for humor. It's no laughing matter. I'm not the one who's not "getting it" here.
theptip 1y ago
> So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices You have to wonder if this will stand up in court. I hope not. AI has a great opportunity to take processes that contain hidden bias and make them more legible and therefore amenable to fixing. But it also has the opportunity to do the opposite, and we should be cautious to make sure guardrails are in place when putting this tech into life-and-death systems. “Stamp this LLM text in a hurry” is an invitation for whatever errors and biases are baked into the system to be propagated. You need provenance and measurement of LLM outputs.
- brookst 1y ago
  Yeah the avoidance of record keeping to reduce disclosure smacks of the policies that got Google into hot water recently: https://www.epspros.com/news-resources/news/2024/google-accused-of-dishonest-document-retention-policies.html https://www.epspros.com/news-resources/news/2024/google-accu...
Workaccount2 1y ago
I wondering how much this even matters in the age of everything being recorded. If they are using axon body cameras and vehicle cameras, then usually the entire interaction is recorded, often from multiple officers. I cannot imagine a defense so incompetent that they rely on the police report rather than watching the entire body cam footage and doing their own assessment. Even if the cops are doing something sketchy (like turning off their camera) then it's not like the police report would be any more trustworthy.
- notaustinpowers 1y ago
  The current administration has already removed the requirement for federal police forces to wear body cameras. As well as made statements (but little action so far) to federalize the police force to be under the jurisdiction of the DOJ. Everything being recorded may not be the case very soon. Sorry, I’d get sources but I just woke up, I’ll edit this later with them.
  - jameshart 1y ago
    If it’s not being recorded, what would this AI summary be based on?
    - brookst 1y ago
      “You are a helpful agent. Police officers will describe an interaction to you and you will write a report that highlights the appropriateness of the officer’s actions, omitting anything that might indicate they acted improperly”
      - jameshart 1y ago
        Are people missing that this AI is being offered by a body cam company?
        istjohn 1y ago
        Why do you think that's relevant?
moron4hire 1y ago
> sign an acknowledgement that the report was generated using Draft One and that they have reviewed the report and made necessary edits to ensure it is consistent with the officer’s recollection. We already know that police officers are not more reliable than the general public as eye witnesses and that eye witness reports are generally very unreliable as they are very susceptible to prompting bias. This seems like leaning in to prompt bias. The AI is now prompting the human rather than the other way around. This is perverse.
- UncleEntity 1y ago
  No doubt. I was watching one of those youtube bodycam videos of an accident scene where one of the cars ended up in a gas station. Police show up and it's chaos -- victims on the ground needing medical attention, witnesses helping (or not) said accident victims, police not knowing who was in what car, &etc. In the midst of all this (when it calmed down enough for the police to get a handle on the scene) they tried to identify someone who didn't want to be involved and promptly cuffed them and threw them in the back of a squad car for "being uncooperative". One of the other witnesses, having seen this, decided that person was the missing driver of the other car and told this to the police with all sorts of confidence. Now the police have a 'suspect' to concentrate on because anyone 'acting squirrelly' must have something to hide as it's totally inconceivable to them someone might just not want to participate in their investigation. Luckily this poor, traumatized kid was able to 'prove' they weren't involved before spending who knows how much time behind bars based on 'credible' eye-witness testimony. These audio-only AI generated reports should be all kinds of accurate now that police are trained to say 'quit resisting' anytime there's any level of force involved specifically for the body cams...
TechDebtDevin 1y ago
[flagged]
- K0balt 1y ago
  Come on over to the Dominican Republic. I’ve been here for 15 years, and I’ve had no problems running several projects from here. In the Cibao region you’ll find IMHO the best culture, and Santiago has a little of everything, though it takes some looking to find the gems. I prefer the mountains between Santiago and Puerto Plata, close to everything but not in the middle of anything. Above 1000m elevation the weather is cool nights, warm days. If you get here HMU if you want to talk about the third industrial revolution and what we’re working on to make it a better ride for humans.
  - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
    I spent a month there working for a client at "caso de campo". I really enjoyed the month. What was weird, I stayed at a town outside (I'm not elite enough to stay at caso de campo :P) forget the name but the whole town was just filled with Italian expats. It has been on my list of potential places. However, the one thing I didn't like though was all Haitian workers, I actually witnessed some pretty awful stuff (like literal bloody fights over water bottles) inside caso de campo where they virtually had Haitian slaves. I'm talking guys standing behind me at dinner waiting to refill my water, and that was their entire existence. Probably better than living Haiti, but it made me feel uncomfortable. Not sure if the rest of the DR is like that though, I didn't really leave that area.
    - K0balt 1y ago
      Ive not seen that kind of mistreatment of people, but I’m sure it happens especially in situations of extreme class disparity. Where I live it’s extremely laid back- it’s rural, 50 minutes from Santiago and an hour from puerto plata. We have a coffee plantation that I pretend to run, but I spend most of my time working on tech and improving our micro-grid and water micro-utility systems. Lots of avocado and fruit trees, cacao, etc. there are several houses and a bunch of cabanas we have built here since 2018, a couple of parks, a lounge, trails etc. we moved a whole project here during Covid, so we built out the campus a little bit to accommodate that. It’s a very campo vibe, but with modern conveniences and systems. If you come by this way, let me know. Where is casa del campo located? Was the town Sosua? I’ve always thought of Sosúa as being mostly German expats, but TBH I typically avoid those kinds of places in favor of the Latino culture, so I wouldn’t really know. There’s island culture and Latino culture here, as well as enclaves and barrios of a lot of nationalities. Santiago has some very euro feeling neighborhoods - but that’s immigrant communities, not expats. Unfortunately a lot of expats prefer spend their time commiserating with other expats about whatever isn’t the same as it is back in their country lol, so I tend to avoid that scene and mostly associate with more established families and people. I like the Cibao area, more of a Castilian vibe, Spanish colonial, and not so much island culture. It’s not that island culture is bad, it’s just that it centers around hospitality, entertainment and tourism, so a white guy often isn’t looked at as a person so much as an opportunity. I think that’s pretty universal across where I’ve been all over the world, port towns and tourist hotspots all have that same vibe.
patrickhogan1 1y ago
This requires audio to work and appears to create more transparency. You can request the audio recording to verify accuracy. This will happen as a routine procedure from defense attorneys. Any problems with the technology would be discovered quickly and if the officer didn’t do their job of correcting the errors before the report is generated they would be torn apart.
- advisedwang 1y ago
  You can verify the accuracy of a transcript, but a police report is much much more than a transcript. It includes off-camera action, smells, states of mind, impressions, context, facial expressions, etc. If Axon hallucinates that stuff, there's no way you can use video footage to check the accuracy or refute the statement.
troupo 1y ago
When EU introduced its AI Act there was much gnashing of teeth here at HN over "stifling of innovation" and "getting left behind in technological backwater". EU AI Act specifically calls out and forbids such applications. Of course, the state will do what the state will do, but there's an actual obstacle enshrined in law.
- rdm_blackhole 1y ago
  And there is the right to privacy enshrined as well but that has no bearing on what states will do ultimately. The EU is in the midst of ending encryption and will soon require lawful access to all your data by forcing providers to bake in legal backdoors in OSes so that nobody can bypass/deactivate them. All of this done under the guise of protecting the children, stopping misinformation(the ministry of truth is back) and protect democracy (TM). The AI act may be a good thing in some cases but we should all stop pretending that the EU is not following in the footsteps of the US when it comes to loss of privacy and restriction of freedom of speech. Many western countries are slowly sliding into wannabe authoritarian regimes.
efitz 1y ago
A lot of people worry about a Terminator style AI apocalypse. I don’t. I worry that we’ve already created the AI apocalypse and that this is what it looks like, along with extremist magnification on social media. I trust AI to be what is is- essentially a lot of math that classisfies and predicts stuff, usually words, that the prediction can be used generatively, and the classification stuff can be used to identify stuff in various media. What I don’t trust is that people will use it responsibly. Hell, I don’t, when I’m vibe coding, but that’s on me. People are venal and self absorbed and busy and lazy and all the other traits that lead to not using AI responsibly. And businesses are amoral (not immoral) and want the shortest path to revenue, with the least friction. So of course police officers who want to be on patrol and did not sign up to spend countless hours on reports, are going to let the AI write it and call it good without proofreading. We could pass a lot of laws trying to specify products that force police to act reliably, or we could maybe just pass a law that says that AI cannot be used to write police reports, but that clearly labeled AI generated transcriptions and summaries may be attached unedited to police reports, if and only if the original recordings are also preserved as evidence. And police departments that keep body camera and car camera footage might be ease up on the report writing and only require officers to annotate it with their impressions, but otherwise let the record speak for itself.
squirrel 1y ago
Creative lawyers will be all over this. First you get the officer to testify that AI helped write the report, then you call the AI as a witness. When the judge tosses that, you start issuing subpoenas to everyone you can find at OpenAI and Axon. As others point out, the actual bodycam footage will be definitively probative for the events it records. But there are plenty of cases where the report itself leads to later actions that may be tortious or criminal, and finding out who's to blame for the exact wording used is highly relevant. Example: AI incorrectly reports that during A's arrest, A made incriminating allegations about B. Based on the report, the police get a warrant and search B's house. When it turns out B is innocent, B sues the department, and when the report turns up during discovery, we're off to the circus.
ingohelpinger 1y ago
but hosters need to save my ip and what not for 1000 years when i surf burger recipes.

255 points by zdw 1y ago

surbas 1y ago

Wonder if OpenAI has all the originals, especially in light of that lawsuit with nytimes.

chaps 1y ago
If so, it'd definitely be FOIA'able.
- brookst 1y ago
  I don’t think FOIA applies to private companies, only government records.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    Not correct. All FOIA laws that I know of say that any records created or held by private corporations under contract to the government are FOIA-able via the government. (the government has to go out and get the records for you)
    - chaps 1y ago
      Yep! Here's Illinois's statutory language on this topic: (2) A public record that is not in the possession of a public body but is in the possession of a party with whom the agency has contracted to perform a governmental function on behalf of the public body, and that directly relates to the governmental function and is not otherwise exempt under this Act, shall be considered a public record of the public body, for purposes of this Act. The nuance is in the definitional limitations/vagueness of "directly relates to the governmental function".
      - qingcharles 1y ago
        Yeah, my bad, I forgot the extra clause. And, of course, you often have to fight even harder for these types of records as it is extra work for the government to do, as chaps above can surely attest. Some stuff slips through, though. For instance, I tried to FOIA the source code for the Voyager probes, but NASA outsourced the dev to Caltech and somehow there is a copyright restriction on it, or something daft like that, which means it cannot be released, even though taxpayers paid the bills.
dylan604 1y ago
From TFA, “ You can read our full report, which details what we found in those documents, how we filed those public records requests, and how you can file your own, here.” With the last word here being a link to another article: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/effs-guide-getting-records-about-axons-ai-generated-police-reports https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/effs-guide-getting-rec...
dmead 1y ago
Their models run on Microsoft models and on azure.

asah 1y ago

The real issue is accountability - officers need to be held accountable for reports the way pilots are accountable for use of auto-pilot[1]. [1] yes they are: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+pilots+accountable+for+use+of+auto-pilot https://www.google.com/search?q=are+pilots+accountable+for+u...

adriand 1y ago
That’s really just one issue among many, and it actually makes me worry more about this technology, not less: it provides a clear incentive for the officer to stand by the contents of a report that he or she did not write, even if they realize at some point it is wrong, because they hastily or lazily signed it. The way this technology is designed is a clear example of dystopian outcomes driven by market forces: capitalism inserted into processes (like justice) which society ought to protect against perversion by profit motives. I can imagine a version of this technology that is designed with societal benefits in mind, but instead we get one designed to make the sale.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  Here's the thing. I've read thousands of police reports. Most police reports are super short and super vague. Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Most criminal charges result in plea deals. Most defendants will never see any evidence against them before pleading guilty†. If, in the exceptionally rare case that a defendant goes to trial, an officer has to testify, it is probably on average a year after he wrote the report. He will be sat down just before trial by the prosecutor and shown his report and asked to read it. On the stand he generally will not have his report available to reference and is supposed to use his memory, but this will be corrupted by his reading of whatever is in the report he read a couple of hours before. If his report is full of inaccuracies he will almost certainly testify under oath to those. †This situation has changed very slightly in the last few years with lawyers now supposed to verify the probable guilt of their client before recommending a guilty plea.
  - FireBeyond 1y ago

mycall 1y ago

It should matter which parts were written by AI or by officer. Once the officer signs off on the report, they take full responsibility for the content.

zdw 1y ago
Do you read EULAs all the way through every time? People just LGTM rubber stamp nearly everything they're given, as it's time efficient in the now.
- tqi 1y ago
  Do you think there is a difference between a civilian driver ignoring the routine maintenance schedule for their car and a professional pilot ignoring the maintenance schedule for their plane?
- 9dev 1y ago
  That’s absolutely their choice, then. But if it turns out the AI wrote bullshit into the report, the officer that rubber stamped it must be held accountable for that, with no difference to a situation where they had written the bullshit themselves.
  - gpm 1y ago
    "Responsibility" doesn't help the person who goes to prison based on the "evidence" of the bullshit report that the jury decided to believe. Or the person who goes to prison when the bullshit report should have exonerated them, but didn't. Or in the other direction entirely a victim whose abuser goes free because of the bullshit in the report. Ultimately accuracy in police reports is a high stakes endeavour, it's not a place to be putting bullshit generators.
conartist6 1y ago
I can only assume you meant to write "shouldn't" instead of "should", but if you study human factors you'll discover that certain kinds of taking-shortcuts behavior are inevitable when dealing with humans. Speeding when we drive, for example. We know we are creating a material risk of getting pulled over and fined, but we just basically decide to ignore that risk because for most of us it is outweighed by the convenience (and real value) of getting everywhere we're going faster. As always considering how a person would interact with an intern is surprisingly instructive to how they will form a working relationship with an non-sentient tool like a language model. You would expect them to give it a probationary experience to earn their trust after which if they are satisfied they will almost certainly express that trust by giving the tool a greater and greater degree of freedom with less active (and less critical) oversight. It is not the initial state that worries me where the officers still mistrust a new technology and are vigilant of it. What worries me is the late-stage where they have learned to trust it (because it has learned to cover their asses correctly) and the AI itself actually ends up exercising power in human social structures because people have a surprising bias towards not speaking up when it would be safer to keep your head down and go with the flow, even when the flow is letting AI take operational control of society inch by inch

Ralfp 1y ago

Having picked a habit of watching propable cause proceedings on YouTube, I wonder if this is simply result of real reports that AI was trained on being purposefully obtuse and laconic to give prosecutors a wiggle space in the court room?

FireBeyond 1y ago
Are you talking about Judge Fleischer in Texas? I do enjoy seeing those (well, I shouldn't). The prosecutors are given the most absolute trash reports to work with. "Failure to ID, after a traffic stop." "What was the stop for?" "It doesn't say." "So no PC for the stop." "A caller and said she thought someone was stealing their neighbor's U Haul. A man was observed walking on that street and taken into custody for ..." "For what? Walking while black?" But no sympathy for the prosecutors either. Garbage reports, but they obviously don't read them pre-hearing, and have plainly become accustomed to judges rubber stamping their PC hearings. I do like that he doesn't go 'lightly' with the defendants. "You got off lucky this time. You know it, I know it. Do better or it might not go the same next time", and when there is PC or other such, he doesn't put up with any bullshit either. More judges like him are needed.
- drewbeck 1y ago
  His patronizing tone to the defendants is the one thing I can’t stand about him. Telling some kid who did nothing wrong and was pulled over for no reason “be careful” is bs. What else should the kid do? They already were doing nothing wrong.
  - Ralfp 1y ago
    My favorite explanation for this is "Everything you say can and will be used against you. So why talk if you are winning?".
    - FireBeyond 1y ago
      He has literally said this. The judge was berating the prosecutor, defendant puts his hand up, "Judge, can I say something?" He looks at him. "Are you winning right now?" "Yeah..." "Then you don't say anything."

csujoy 1y ago

our officers don’t have time to comb through every transcript, fixing it for privacy, empathy, and all that. But keeping the transcripts is still a big win: more info in police records can make police officers more data-driven :)

causal 1y ago

I think such a tool could be useful for ensuring all the facts get included, but I hate the idea that some departments could start highering illiterate officers if this tech goes far enough.

viraptor 1y ago
> could start highering illiterate officers I love this mistake.
- causal 1y ago
  Heh. Gonna leave it then
- alganet 1y ago
  Can you elaborate a little bit more?
  - teamspirit 1y ago
    “Highering” should be “hiring”
    - alganet 1y ago
      I asked for viraptor's elaboration on what he thinks of it. Thanks for your perspective though.
      - jameshart 1y ago
        Normally people don’t come back to explain a joke, because it ruins it.
        alganet 1y ago
        One could say "it's a joke", without explaining it, thus, not ruining it. Also, saying some vague shit and then claiming it as a joke is very convenient. Finally, police injustice is not a subject for humor. It's no laughing matter. I'm not the one who's not "getting it" here.

theptip 1y ago

> So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices You have to wonder if this will stand up in court. I hope not. AI has a great opportunity to take processes that contain hidden bias and make them more legible and therefore amenable to fixing. But it also has the opportunity to do the opposite, and we should be cautious to make sure guardrails are in place when putting this tech into life-and-death systems. “Stamp this LLM text in a hurry” is an invitation for whatever errors and biases are baked into the system to be propagated. You need provenance and measurement of LLM outputs.

brookst 1y ago
Yeah the avoidance of record keeping to reduce disclosure smacks of the policies that got Google into hot water recently: https://www.epspros.com/news-resources/news/2024/google-accused-of-dishonest-document-retention-policies.html https://www.epspros.com/news-resources/news/2024/google-accu...

Workaccount2 1y ago

I wondering how much this even matters in the age of everything being recorded. If they are using axon body cameras and vehicle cameras, then usually the entire interaction is recorded, often from multiple officers. I cannot imagine a defense so incompetent that they rely on the police report rather than watching the entire body cam footage and doing their own assessment. Even if the cops are doing something sketchy (like turning off their camera) then it's not like the police report would be any more trustworthy.

notaustinpowers 1y ago
The current administration has already removed the requirement for federal police forces to wear body cameras. As well as made statements (but little action so far) to federalize the police force to be under the jurisdiction of the DOJ. Everything being recorded may not be the case very soon. Sorry, I’d get sources but I just woke up, I’ll edit this later with them.
- jameshart 1y ago
  If it’s not being recorded, what would this AI summary be based on?
  - brookst 1y ago
    “You are a helpful agent. Police officers will describe an interaction to you and you will write a report that highlights the appropriateness of the officer’s actions, omitting anything that might indicate they acted improperly”
    - jameshart 1y ago
      Are people missing that this AI is being offered by a body cam company?
      - istjohn 1y ago
        Why do you think that's relevant?

moron4hire 1y ago

> sign an acknowledgement that the report was generated using Draft One and that they have reviewed the report and made necessary edits to ensure it is consistent with the officer’s recollection. We already know that police officers are not more reliable than the general public as eye witnesses and that eye witness reports are generally very unreliable as they are very susceptible to prompting bias. This seems like leaning in to prompt bias. The AI is now prompting the human rather than the other way around. This is perverse.

UncleEntity 1y ago
No doubt. I was watching one of those youtube bodycam videos of an accident scene where one of the cars ended up in a gas station. Police show up and it's chaos -- victims on the ground needing medical attention, witnesses helping (or not) said accident victims, police not knowing who was in what car, &etc. In the midst of all this (when it calmed down enough for the police to get a handle on the scene) they tried to identify someone who didn't want to be involved and promptly cuffed them and threw them in the back of a squad car for "being uncooperative". One of the other witnesses, having seen this, decided that person was the missing driver of the other car and told this to the police with all sorts of confidence. Now the police have a 'suspect' to concentrate on because anyone 'acting squirrelly' must have something to hide as it's totally inconceivable to them someone might just not want to participate in their investigation. Luckily this poor, traumatized kid was able to 'prove' they weren't involved before spending who knows how much time behind bars based on 'credible' eye-witness testimony. These audio-only AI generated reports should be all kinds of accurate now that police are trained to say 'quit resisting' anytime there's any level of force involved specifically for the body cams...

TechDebtDevin 1y ago

[flagged]

K0balt 1y ago
Come on over to the Dominican Republic. I’ve been here for 15 years, and I’ve had no problems running several projects from here. In the Cibao region you’ll find IMHO the best culture, and Santiago has a little of everything, though it takes some looking to find the gems. I prefer the mountains between Santiago and Puerto Plata, close to everything but not in the middle of anything. Above 1000m elevation the weather is cool nights, warm days. If you get here HMU if you want to talk about the third industrial revolution and what we’re working on to make it a better ride for humans.
- TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  I spent a month there working for a client at "caso de campo". I really enjoyed the month. What was weird, I stayed at a town outside (I'm not elite enough to stay at caso de campo :P) forget the name but the whole town was just filled with Italian expats. It has been on my list of potential places. However, the one thing I didn't like though was all Haitian workers, I actually witnessed some pretty awful stuff (like literal bloody fights over water bottles) inside caso de campo where they virtually had Haitian slaves. I'm talking guys standing behind me at dinner waiting to refill my water, and that was their entire existence. Probably better than living Haiti, but it made me feel uncomfortable. Not sure if the rest of the DR is like that though, I didn't really leave that area.
  - K0balt 1y ago
    Ive not seen that kind of mistreatment of people, but I’m sure it happens especially in situations of extreme class disparity. Where I live it’s extremely laid back- it’s rural, 50 minutes from Santiago and an hour from puerto plata. We have a coffee plantation that I pretend to run, but I spend most of my time working on tech and improving our micro-grid and water micro-utility systems. Lots of avocado and fruit trees, cacao, etc. there are several houses and a bunch of cabanas we have built here since 2018, a couple of parks, a lounge, trails etc. we moved a whole project here during Covid, so we built out the campus a little bit to accommodate that. It’s a very campo vibe, but with modern conveniences and systems. If you come by this way, let me know. Where is casa del campo located? Was the town Sosua? I’ve always thought of Sosúa as being mostly German expats, but TBH I typically avoid those kinds of places in favor of the Latino culture, so I wouldn’t really know. There’s island culture and Latino culture here, as well as enclaves and barrios of a lot of nationalities. Santiago has some very euro feeling neighborhoods - but that’s immigrant communities, not expats. Unfortunately a lot of expats prefer spend their time commiserating with other expats about whatever isn’t the same as it is back in their country lol, so I tend to avoid that scene and mostly associate with more established families and people. I like the Cibao area, more of a Castilian vibe, Spanish colonial, and not so much island culture. It’s not that island culture is bad, it’s just that it centers around hospitality, entertainment and tourism, so a white guy often isn’t looked at as a person so much as an opportunity. I think that’s pretty universal across where I’ve been all over the world, port towns and tourist hotspots all have that same vibe.

patrickhogan1 1y ago

This requires audio to work and appears to create more transparency. You can request the audio recording to verify accuracy. This will happen as a routine procedure from defense attorneys. Any problems with the technology would be discovered quickly and if the officer didn’t do their job of correcting the errors before the report is generated they would be torn apart.

advisedwang 1y ago
You can verify the accuracy of a transcript, but a police report is much much more than a transcript. It includes off-camera action, smells, states of mind, impressions, context, facial expressions, etc. If Axon hallucinates that stuff, there's no way you can use video footage to check the accuracy or refute the statement.

troupo 1y ago

When EU introduced its AI Act there was much gnashing of teeth here at HN over "stifling of innovation" and "getting left behind in technological backwater". EU AI Act specifically calls out and forbids such applications. Of course, the state will do what the state will do, but there's an actual obstacle enshrined in law.

rdm_blackhole 1y ago
And there is the right to privacy enshrined as well but that has no bearing on what states will do ultimately. The EU is in the midst of ending encryption and will soon require lawful access to all your data by forcing providers to bake in legal backdoors in OSes so that nobody can bypass/deactivate them. All of this done under the guise of protecting the children, stopping misinformation(the ministry of truth is back) and protect democracy (TM). The AI act may be a good thing in some cases but we should all stop pretending that the EU is not following in the footsteps of the US when it comes to loss of privacy and restriction of freedom of speech. Many western countries are slowly sliding into wannabe authoritarian regimes.

efitz 1y ago

A lot of people worry about a Terminator style AI apocalypse. I don’t. I worry that we’ve already created the AI apocalypse and that this is what it looks like, along with extremist magnification on social media. I trust AI to be what is is- essentially a lot of math that classisfies and predicts stuff, usually words, that the prediction can be used generatively, and the classification stuff can be used to identify stuff in various media. What I don’t trust is that people will use it responsibly. Hell, I don’t, when I’m vibe coding, but that’s on me. People are venal and self absorbed and busy and lazy and all the other traits that lead to not using AI responsibly. And businesses are amoral (not immoral) and want the shortest path to revenue, with the least friction. So of course police officers who want to be on patrol and did not sign up to spend countless hours on reports, are going to let the AI write it and call it good without proofreading. We could pass a lot of laws trying to specify products that force police to act reliably, or we could maybe just pass a law that says that AI cannot be used to write police reports, but that clearly labeled AI generated transcriptions and summaries may be attached unedited to police reports, if and only if the original recordings are also preserved as evidence. And police departments that keep body camera and car camera footage might be ease up on the report writing and only require officers to annotate it with their impressions, but otherwise let the record speak for itself.

squirrel 1y ago

Creative lawyers will be all over this. First you get the officer to testify that AI helped write the report, then you call the AI as a witness. When the judge tosses that, you start issuing subpoenas to everyone you can find at OpenAI and Axon. As others point out, the actual bodycam footage will be definitively probative for the events it records. But there are plenty of cases where the report itself leads to later actions that may be tortious or criminal, and finding out who's to blame for the exact wording used is highly relevant. Example: AI incorrectly reports that during A's arrest, A made incriminating allegations about B. Based on the report, the police get a warrant and search B's house. When it turns out B is innocent, B sues the department, and when the report turns up during discovery, we're off to the circus.

ingohelpinger 1y ago

but hosters need to save my ip and what not for 1000 years when i surf burger recipes.