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Indeed. I anticipate the next Post Office Scandal(1,2) attributed to LLMs.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal 2 https://www.postofficescandal.uk/

discuss

That's awful.

Reminds me of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal [0], where 26,000 families were unfairly labeled as having committed tax fraud (11,000 of which had been targeted via "risk profiling", as they had dual nationalities [1]). Bad policy + automation = disaster. The wikipedia article doesn't fully explain how some automated decisions were made (e.g. You had a typo in a form, therefore all previous benefits were clawed-back; if you owe more than €3.000,- then you're a fraudster and if you called to ask for clarification they wouldn't help you — you're officially labeled a fraudster, you see).

Edit: couldn't find a source for my last statement, but I remember hearing it in an episode of the great Dutch News podcast. I'll see if I can find it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...

[1]: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2021/02/full-scale-parliamentary-in...

rolandog|1 year ago

Just for posterity, I couldn't find the specific podcast episode, but there are public statements from some of the victims [0] available online (translated):

> What personally hurt you the most about how you were treated? > Derya: 'The worst thing about all of this, I think, was that I was registered as a fraudster. But I didn't know anything about that. There was a legal process for it, but they blocked it by not telling me what OGS (intent gross negligence) entailed. They had given me the qualification OGS and that was reason for judges to send me home with rejections. I didn't get any help anywhere and only now do I realize that I didn't stand a chance. All those years I fought against the heaviest sanction they could impose on me and I didn't know anything. I worked for the government. I worked very hard. And yet I was faced with wage garnishment and had to use the food bank. If I had known that I was just a fraudster and that was why I was being treated like that, I wouldn't have exhausted myself to prove that I did work hard and could pay off my debts myself. I literally and figuratively worked myself to death. And the consequences are now huge. Unfortunately.'

[0]: https://www.bnnvara.nl/artikelen/hoe-gaat-het-nu-met-de-slac...