Police forces across the world and in particular in the USA are already using it.
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.
Any technology that may be responsibly used today has no guarantee of being used responsibly and ethically in the future.
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 polls are to be believed, the UK is likely to be ruled by a far-right party after the next general election.
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.
I don't think you can base your prediction of the next general election on a single local election for a constituency that has been a labour stronghold since its inception in 1983.
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.
> 800 hours of video searched in 3 hours, hardly the destruction of democracy
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.
Not to get into an internet argument, but the entire premise of what you say is false -- and I'm not just saying that to argue.
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 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.
Thankfully, we do have laws that change with the times over here in the UK. Just a couple months ago we had a constitutional change (abolishment of hereditary peers) and that was just another Thursday. It's fine, we don't need to rely on deliberately inefficient police force.
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.
That is true. Police will have to use AI (criminals will!) but we need protect socieity from any bias, miscarriage of justice, police harrassment etc. There needs to be strict governance over the tool use.
A cop in the UK was recently suspended (I think suspended) for allegedly using AI unofficially to fabricate evidence.
Why would you think that? This is never going to work. It's going to get handed to SSS/NEC/Capita/whatever the fuck they're called this week, they'll get billions of pounds of government money, they won't be able to launch, and it'll quietly get buried.
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.
I think this is going to lead towards companies and governments starting to build their own data centres for this kind of thing (reviewing millions of emails to find the smoking gun is what the cops will want to do as will both sides in a civil case). The thing is no-one (probably not OpenAI) wants to send kidnapping footage to data centre in Texas for a Manchester case.
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 ?
> The thing we are all finding now (software devs) is that AI is great but boy is it pricey if we want anything useful …
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?
I'm pretty disappointed to see all this nonsense about the UK on Hacker News.
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.
I think as soon as you understand that Americans in general at best pity and at worst hate us based on a rather old-fashioned concept of how we live and are governed, you understand that it doesn't matter how far the USA falls from their ideals, they will always project worse onto us, because us being worse is part of the founding mythology.
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: 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.
I’ve heard ‘the hyperbole is insane’ since 9/11 and this is what the world looks like today. Don’t try to sane wash yet another attempt at expanding the extent of mass surveillance, despite how silly it might seem on paper.
£75m could only be the beginning. Next spending might be £750m if the results are going to please the stakeholders. Tomorrow digital Stasi might be knocking at your door.
I believe it means evidence stored as digital data that was translated with AI, which then led to arrests. I don't think the crime gang was translating e-books illegally.
They are saying the police translated ebooks using AI, so it’s definitely not the gang. Using ebooks to say digital data is really strange if that’s what they meant
Nobody answered your question yet. Did you get an answer from someone else? Are they in the room with you right now?
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.
I suppose you have never reported a crime. You get crime reference number if you are lucky and then weeks later a notification "investigation" been closed.
Is Priti Patel still running the Home Office? I honestly couldn’t tell the difference in policies between BoJo and Starmer.
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.
The president of the US literally attempted a coup, then was found liable for rape, and then got re-elected, then threatened to invade the European Union, then kidnapped the President of Venezuela, then invaded Iran.
How in the fuck is the UK "scarier" than the US. What is this obsession with the UK that americans have?
How does the US president change the view of the UK? Trump is a moron, reminds me at times of Idiocracy, esp. with UFC cage fights. However, the link to the UK eludes me
Most people on here are in the US, and the baseline of "scary" implied by that (and many other) posts is definitely not where it should be.
"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.
This wasn't ignored and your source corroborates the fact. It was front page news, there were two IPPC investigations, and an inquest. This is also an example from 2005. An odd choice to reference in a thread about Police use of AI.
I don't see what's "scary" about this link. It's talking about pretty much standard data processing, Palantir is doing that in the US for many years now.
Yes, I'm saying it's a normal part of a functioning country to onboard tech into their law enforcement. If anything it's positive in this case, because it's a domestic effort and not just buying a similar system from Palantir.
As a Brit - yeah it's horrendous, but to me it's like there's two completely disjointed realities. One online, where UK seems to be the most surveiled and invigilated of the "western" countries where your every action is tracked, and then the second one is out in the real world, where the police and in general various agencies are borderline useless, unwilling to investigate any crime, where I genuienly wonder what's the point of obeying the rules of the road, paying taxes, or in fact not just walking out of the store with a trolley full of groceries without paying since none of this seems to be prosecuted in the slightest. Reporting crime happening literally outside of my doors has zero effect. You had your house broken into, car stolen, bicycle nicked? It would be a miracle for a policeman to show up to even take your statement. Businesses saying they have persistent problems with criminals walking out with the merchandise, no action is ever taken, or it's completely ineffective. Or how I'm literally scared to walk around with my child or ride a bike on bike paths because groups of men riding surrons in balaclavas are a daily sight around what is a tiny town in North of England - I keep reporting them to 101 all the time and yet I see them every day(but somehow not a single policeman).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
A cop in the UK was recently suspended (I think suspended) for allegedly using AI unofficially to fabricate evidence.
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.
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?
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: 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.
Does someone have details on this? I don’t see how ebooks translation relates to arresting organized crime gang
See https://rapeganginquiry.co.uk/ .
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux
Almost no-one talks about that anymore. It's still mostly unsolved.
Children matter, right?
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.