YAP – should we be afraid?

Here is a ‘factoid’ from the investment trade press, commenting on AI applications:

A good example is a recently released AI product called Draft One, developed by Axon in the US. The company, previously known as TASER International after its initial product line, produces equipment used by law enforcement agencies in particular. From Tasers, it diversified into cameras and now offers bodycams, dashcams and software.
Draft One is a multimodal AI tool, meaning it can interpret words, audio and video, that can automatically generate a police report from the footage captured by an officer’s bodycam. On returning to their station, Draft One will have already drafted the vast majority of an incident report, maybe even capturing information that would otherwise have been omitted. The officer is then simply required to complete and verify the report. From field trials in the US, the product has delivered an 82% reduction in the time taken to write reports.²

Citywire Infocus

Some years ago, before AI was ‘a word in common parlance’, as lawyers like to say, the famous economics and finance professor, Dr Robert Schiller was explaining how ‘sell side’ stock brokers had learned about algorithms being used by investment researchers to glean data from mass media coverage of companies. In those days, it might have been as simple as the number of times a name was searched on Google, or scanned by Google’s ‘spider’ when collecting the data it used for searches (and we now know, rather more).

He explained that those responsible for promoting shares (as I have explained to readers taking my investment training, shares are sold much like health food supplements) would make up superfluous press releases containing words that they expected to be searched for in the research algorithms. By that means, they increased the odds of getting their company reported to the researchers who might make it a buy recommendation. A sort of FOMO stimulus.

This produced some very amusing results on occasions, like when there was a sudden tick up in interest in the shares of Jupter Investment Management, then run by Edward Bonham-Carter. It turned out that his sister Helena was up for an acting award, but the algorithm was only set up to look for the surname, so her media coverage was assumed to represent a surge of interest in Jupiter shares!

Even simple Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or YouTube video listing work is a form of the same process of trying to find out what feeds an algorithm and then stuffing the inputs to get a given result.

It will not be long, I anticipate with my usual sad but experienced view of humanity, before the police are pointing their body cams at just what they need to get the report written to tell the story the way they want it told. You know, officer out of shot puts the gun in the hand of the dead black guy, raising it in an aggresssive pose, then another officer turns to get a bodycam image? I hope I am wrong.