Less fake than a dystopian reality, more truthful than a realistic hypothesis. It happens in the United States, where it is possible for a police report to be drawn up by an artificial intelligence model capable of interpreting and transcribing the audio extracted from an officer’s bodycam. It’s called Draft One and uses AI based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model to transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. It is the latest product from Axon, a leading company in the sector of technological solutions for law enforcement.
Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes that police officers will then be able to review the document to ensure its accuracy. One of the tool’s early testers, the Fort Collins Police Department in Colorado, saw an 82 percent decrease in time spent writing reports. “If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut those times in half, we have the opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time to get back to policing,” Smith said.
These reports, however, are often used as evidence in criminal trials and there are many doubts in this regard. The first objection that is raised concerns the ability of artificial intelligence to correctly interpret language and distinguish those linguistic patterns that may show racial prejudices, clearly or unconsciously.
“It’s kind of a nightmare,” said Dave Maass, director of surveillance technology investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“Police, who do not specialize in AI and will not specialize in recognizing AI problems, will use these systems to generate language that could influence millions of people in their involvement with the criminal justice system.” Smith said Axon is recommending police not use AI to write reports for serious incidents such as a police shooting, where vital information could be missed. “An officer-involved shooting is probably a scenario where it wouldn’t be used, and I would probably advise people against doing that, just because there’s so much complexity, the stakes are so high.” Axon’s CEO also reported that some early customers are using Draft One only for minor crimes, although others are writing down “more significant incidents,” including use-of-force cases. Axon, however, will not have control over how individual police departments use the tools.