UK Home Office launches £75M 'PoliceAI' to capitalise on artificial intelligence
publictechnology.net
publictechnology.net
Now we have democracy manipulation spearheaded by AI bot manipulation of their very own citizenry. Not limited to UK, USA is deep in it too.
What this is for is much simpler - it's for funnelling billions of pounds of the public purse into wealthy Conservatives. We've had nearly 50 years of Tory misrule and fraud. This is just Businesss As Usual for them.
We've had a Conservative government since Thatcher.
You are completely wrong.
Laws in their current state are a completely broken system, because they don't account for future technology, and do not include a mandatory regular review.
When the 2nd ammendment was included in the constitution, guns were innacurate and unreliable weapons shooting a few bullets per minute. If the guns then had been the assault rifles shooting at 900RPM you can buy nowadays in Walmart, you better believe the 2nd ammendment would not exist.
Similarly, you do not know what was the intent when video surveillance was first deemed acceptable evidence in court. But you know for sure that they weren't processing 800 hours of video in 3 hours, and you also know that they intent for this review to be done by actual human beings.
Substituting political process and laws changing with the times with political nihilism and fetishisation of old norms (indeed, see 2A; also see a paramilitary executing political opponents and how 2A influenced that) is how one ends up with a broken state.
> There's no need for the mechanism that you seem to have in mind
Sure. In the meantime it's illegal to be drunk in a pub: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/35-36/94#commentar...
1. The intent was and is categorically not for the review of CCTV or any evidence to be specifically carried out by humans.
2. Law can't - and isn't suppose to - account for specific future technology, that's future prediction which is impossible.
What you mean is you disagree. What you mean is you believe a human should be involved in video evidence review. I'm not sure why, because it's clearly an area of waste. Maybe you have reservations about accuracy. Then what you mean is you want the technology to be at a certain level of accuracy before it is used in practice.
I suspect you do believe the accuracy isn't good enough, but you've forgotten the layered controls in English law. People are tried by other people. An AI tool that speeds up triage isn't the judge or jury.
The point I am making is general: it is not because something seems harmless than it is. It is not because something is legal that it should be.
Imagine llm’s analyzing every frame of every security camera everywhere (including shared ones like stores, flock, ring etc). Then an agentic judge issues warrants.
It won't happen within the next few years, but in a couple of decades it'll be there.
A cop in the UK was recently suspended (I think suspended) for allegedly using AI unofficially to fabricate evidence.
I would much, much rather see this experiment contained to one really boring, competent British AI project than allow the kind of bullshit we are seeing, and maybe this will be a key plank in the process of actually pushing Palantir out.
If the polls are to be believed, the UK is likely to be ruled by a far-right party after the next general election.
Between this, digital ID, police facial recognition technology, and 'age verification', well... its like the current incumbent party are actively trying to give the new one all of the tools needed to oppress before they're even in office.
If the most recent actual election of a candidate is to be believed, Reform cannot even take a high stakes scalp in the easiest possible context — a totally unnecessary, frankly engineered election designed to solve the Labour leadership crisis.
Even in that absolutely fucking farcical, facially offensive, wasteful context, voters still managed to organise themselves to conclusively keep out the one candidate who they could have used to give the government a kicking.
So I am less worried than I was. Reform have always had the biggest hill to climb in political history to get enough candidates to form a majority; it will be desperately hard work.
And now I think they have much less of a chance of doing it. Makerfield was a test they failed unambiguously, and partly this is because they have already split on the right. They really, really wanted it, and they failed.
Like it or not, the polls are scary, and they're predicting something that is possible. The incumbent government should be bearing that in mind when making decisions.
(And I don't think you can use council election numbers as a way to predict a parliamentary majority; it doesn't really work that way.)
Labour strongholds in that area have fallen to Reform, and Reform and Restore both put a lot into that race.
Winning it is the most important thing Reform could have done, and they had the biggest possible chance to see the electorate use a vote for them as a kick in the face to the Labour party.
(A kick in the face I believe they richly deserved for trying the whole idea in the first place; it is staggeringly obtuse to force a constituency election to solve an internal party problem.)
Literally a once-in-a-generation chance to deliver a blow to the unity of the governing party. Nothing like it in 30 years. They put a lot into it and they didn't win it.
Now see how they will have to do better in 320-odd constituencies with different local issues. Can they find 320 candidates that the locals won't loathe or organise against?
A Reform outright majority is only barely possible on a technical level; it's just an enormous challenge (and if they do achieve it, to be clear, I think the country will be in a kind of existential terror for generations).
They will be the official opposition; that much is in no doubt. But it's a personality cult party and I think there's pretty strong evidence (from Restore's share) that the personality cult is wearing off.
And the country that was beginning to despair has just been shown, unambiguously, that tactical voting can keep them out. Which is something many constituencies knew in 2024, mine among them.
So as angry as I am that Makerfield happened at all (it's a bit of an outrageous farce, really), I am a little more optimistic.
The thing we are all finding now (software devs) is that AI is great but boy is it pricey if we want anything useful …
And walking through millions of pages of digital evidence is going to cost, and I think governments would rather buy a rack of H100s and spread the cost.
So is the national AI drive one to be able to build frontier models, or one to just build data centre or one to build a chips capability a few years behind ?
What?
A $200/month subscription to Claude, $100/month at OpenAI, and $25/month with Gemini should get you more than you could possibly use? Unless you really want to take a hands-off approach, in which case DeepSeek is pennies on the dollar...
It's still very cheap, is what I'm saying. Am I missing something?
Besides, quality has a lot to do with the person using it & reviewing/editing the code.
In this case - let the market decide
The answer is: police investigate crimes. So if you go to them with a complaint about corruption, they will investigate it with whatever tools they are legally able to use and can afford.
Does someone have details on this? I don’t see how ebooks translation relates to arresting organized crime gang
What do you prefer, authoritarianism in red, authoritarianism in blue, or a Nigel the Trump bootlicker? At this point I’d rather have the monarchy back, at least you knew where is the class system you’re supposed to fit, and whose boot to lick.
Like the UK being the most scary country of all Western democracies? Have you not see what's happening in the USA? The US, Europe, and UK are all trying to implement basically the same ideas.
Now, I completely disagree with the current government in pretty much anything related to "protect the children", but the hyperbole is insane.
Finally, have you seen the UK's track record with IT projects? This is never going anywhere. £75 is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
It comes out in many ways, and the more you see it the harder it is to ignore it.
But it has recently become text again in a way that it hasn't been since Joe Kennedy's days: Trump, Vance and Hegseth have just openly sneered at and defamed us, and because we favour the political, diplomatic approach, we've taken a lot of shit that it turns out Giorgia Meloni won't take (more to that story, I am sure).
FWIW this is mutual. I think Americans are increasingly going to be shocked to find that Brits are no longer bothering to convince themselves that the average American is not like the average Trump administration official.
We no longer waste time saying "OK their government is a bunch of nuts and bigots, and their gun laws insane, but Americans are pretty cool". We no longer forgive them their government; we now average out Americans. The presumption of coolness in Americans who travel, always pretty damn well-earned in my own experience, is gone.
In short we're going to treat them much more like the French do.
It will get worse and worse but we're not alone. And actually I hope people in the UK finally grasp this, especially people on the political right. Closer ties with the USA was the through-line of Brexit. But it's a fucking insane idea. We are less like them than we are like most of Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_sexual_abuse_cases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
(This link list is just the tip of an iceberg)
And now they changed lanes to fully protect themselves against people who may uncover such cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux
Almost no-one talks about that anymore. It's still mostly unsolved.
Children matter, right?
The list goes on.
It’s a total replication of idiocracy. What right wing social media slop are you consuming that you think the US is in good shape?
How in the fuck is the UK "scarier" than the US. What is this obsession with the UK that americans have?
Do you not count the US as a western democracy?
"Moron" doesn't nearly do it justice. The US saw a paramilitary force lead by an open racist (he was recently hanging out with open nazis on a "remigration" conference) executing a political opponent right on the street on camera, with zero consequences. A substantial proportion of the US cheered for literal concentration camps. Budget money is pretty openly funnelled to Trump's family and friends. This is not "Trump is a moron", this is a catastrophe and democratic collapse that is not nearly in the same category as "oh but what if they use the technology for surveillance".
I suspect that this obsession with the UK is just a coping mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Men...
Or the whole meme of London having more cameras than people, but when a crime happens all of these cameras are impossible to access, in private hands, or broken - you could drive a stolen car through Oxford Circus and no one would stop you. Not to mention how every high street is now just a 50/50 mix of vape/phone shops, none of them ever have a customer in sight but somehow have a dude sitting there 24/7. But the sign changes every month to a new business. But no, the "most scary of western democracies" can't even prosecute organised crime properly.
I just wonder if the focus on online laws is because it's so much easier to focus on this than any of the above problems.