‘Asian Nazis’ Be Damned: Cops Coveting AI for 2024
by Michael Dean Thompson
In 2023, the general public became aware of the impending emergence of Artificial General Intelligence. It was not long after ChatGPT 3.5 became public that Americans began to understand the remarkable technology is spookily powerful while not completely reliable. Infamously, a law firm was reprimanded for allowing the AI to generate a brief that was filled with fake citations. The AI confabulated the citations, and nobody at the firm thought to check them, such was their apparent faith in the new technology. Newer versions of AI are better but not quite there – who can forget the “Asian Nazis” generated by a ChatGPT rival AI?
It should come as no surprise that cops are looking forward to taking advantage of AI to assist them with solving criminal cases. Along with other technologies, it was the topic of Forensicmag.com’s “Six Ways Digital Investigations Will Change in 2024.” One solution provided is the use of AI to automatically download information from various sources, including the internet, about a suspect. That data would likely include things that were posted by and about the suspect even though the AI has no real means of understanding that the posts may be nothing more than reflecting the modern pastime of “shitposting.” Consider as an example how much content a search for “Hillary Clinton” and “pedophilia” turn up on any system not explicitly commanded to ignore it. Unlike the public systems, a cop-focused AI would likely be set to “leave no stone unturned.”
The article also hailed the growing use of “open-source intelligence” (“OSINT”) as well as greater intelligence sharing among federal, state, and local agencies. A recent government report on the failures with intelligence gathering and sharing among fusion centers has previously been covered by Criminal Legal News. The agents at the fusion centers were sharing content in very poor taste and inane “intelligence.” One example was the agent who reported that a specific model of vehicle had interior access to the trunk through fold-down rear seats. It is hard to trust that the shared intelligence will consistently rise above that earthshattering revelation.
Cops are naturally looking forward to new ways to access cellphones, as well as the vast troves of data theory generate. The article even proposes that criminal activity could be tracked via “Netflix search history.” Sadly, they do not even need access to the phone for that type of information as myriad data brokers will happily sell it to them.
As AI aggregates the volumes of data, its learned and programmed biases will tell it what data is relevant and what to ignore. Can we trust the cop, prosecutor, and defense attorneys looking at the data to know when they are seeing “Asian Nazis”?
Source: forensicmag.com
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