WIRED得知，英国政府正考虑调查内政部使用基因AI工具处理庇护申请的情况。 潜在调查跟随立法者和研究人员
独立边境和移民事务监察长(ICIBI)负责监督内政部对边境、移民和海关的管理，要求数字权利非营利开放权利团体(ORG)在为明年将检查的议题制定计划时，分享更多有关工具的信息，研究组的调查结果来自对工具的六个月调查，其中涉及11个议会问题、两封部长信函和10个公开记录，要求向内政部查询细节，而内政部却隐瞒了工具的细节。
ICIBI告诉WIRED，在公布其年度检查重点之前，它不能确认哪些议题正在积极审议，但是称意识到对AI工具的使用的关切，并指出它去年的调查结果是该工具的"有效性和可靠性各不相同".
“辅助决定由训练有素的办案人员作出，人工智能工具仅用于协助浏览面谈记录和政策信息。 发言人在电子邮件中告诉WIRED。 “我们定期监测这些工具与我们既定的质量保障进程之间的运行情况，并已经承诺在其推出时公布最新评价。”
内政部利用基于OpenAI的2023 GPT-4大语言模型和Microsoft Foundry的庇护案件汇总和庇护政策搜索工具，根据ORG获得的文件，汇总与庇护申请者面谈的记录和关于原籍国的资料。 2024年末，随着劳工政府试图清理大约10万起积压的庇护案件，移民和执法当局开始试行这些工具，同时在联合王国每年收到的数以万计的新申请之上。 虽然该部取得了重大进展，到6月为止的一年中等待初步决定的人数减半，但对决定提出的上诉数量急剧增加。
研究者担心AI工具的准确性，特别是决定是否将某人送回他们害怕被迫害的国家，研究组发现，加勒比国家联盟提出的摘要百分比被认为不适宜使用，因为其中往往含有事实错误或错报，大大高于试点评估中计算出的公布的9%错误率。 它还发现，对APS编写的摘要没有质量控制。
庇护决策者在审查庇护案件时使用这些工具来节省时间；如果一起使用，根据政府的估计，试点人员显示，这些工具可以节省大约一小时。 办案人员利用加勒比国家联盟加快审查面谈记录，其中寻求庇护者解释了他们在自己国家受到迫害的原因和害怕返回的原因。 他们利用APS作为搜索助手，寻找和总结国家政策信息，告知申请人在本国是否面临真正的伤害风险。 7月，一名英国法官指责内政部援引一份 " AI幻觉 " 文件，拒绝一名摩洛哥妇女及其子女的庇护申请，理由是她的原籍国将安全地返回。
“我们正在处理人们的生活。 工党议员Bell Ribeiro-Addy告诉WIRED说，“我只是认为机器这样做是不恰当的。
内政部的发言人称指出，“人工智能的使用只是我们保护边界的工具之一，不能取代人类决策者的作用或使其自动化。”
Ribeiro-Addy、Alsherif和单独调查这些工具的公法项目也担心，GPT模式中记录齐全的“文化偏见”可能导致语言障碍和摘要中文化细微差别的丧失，从而导致歧视性决定。 OpenAI 发言人向WIRED强调公司正在进行的提高模型准确性的工作，并指出公司将于一月将GPT-4退休。
在没有法规的情况下，联合王国的 " AI Playbook " 规定，各部门必须对其在决策过程中使用的算法工具保持透明，并向公众提供有关这些工具的信息，包括将这些工具列入公共储存库。 内政部的案例汇总和政策搜索工具未列入清单。
寻求庇护者在案件中使用这些AI工具时也不被告知。 称 Alsherif领导ORG的移民数字司法方案。 “所以我们需要让他们知道这一点，让他们知道它是如何运作的，以便他们能够挑战它。” Cloisters律师无法对其个人信息错误的AI摘要提出质疑，可能违反联合王国的数据权利法，他们在ORG委托的独立法律意见中写道。 内政部指出，决策过程的部分内容可能涉及其隐私通知的自动化。
这两个小组已将调查结果送交联合王国的数据监管机构，即信息委员会，该委员会目前正在调查内政部拒绝告知ORG工作人员如何使用，并接受了使用两个AI工具的培训。
公法项目资深研究员Caroline Selman 也称ACS和APS工具只是11个高风险AI系统中的两个，她担心政府内部可能部署更多人员
称 Selman表示：「如果你不知道正在使用
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A UK government watchdog is considering an investigation into the Home Office’s use of generative AI tools to process asylum applications, WIRED has learned. The potential probe follows lawmakers and researchers publicly questioning the tools’ accuracy and the government’s secrecy around their use.
The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), which monitors the Home Office’s management of borders, immigration, and customs, has asked digital rights nonprofit Open Rights Group (ORG) to share more information on the tools as it draws up plans for the topics it will inspect next year, campaigner Sara Alsherif tells WIRED. ORG’s findings come from a six-month investigation into the tools, which involved 11 parliamentary questions, two ministerial letters, and 10 public records requests that attempt to pry details from the Home Office, which has withheld details on the tools.
The ICIBI tells WIRED it cannot confirm what topics are under active consideration before it publishes its annual inspection priorities, but it says it is aware of concerns about the use of AI tools and pointed to its findings last year that one of the tool’s “effectiveness and reliability were varied.”
“Asylum decisions are made by trained caseworkers, with AI tools used only to assist in navigating interview records and policy information. They cannot be used in isolation and do not make decisions on claims,” a Home Office spokesperson tells WIRED in an email. “We regularly monitor the performance of these tools alongside our established quality-assurance processes, and have already committed to publishing updated evaluations on their roll out.”
The Home Office uses the Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS) and Asylum Policy Search (APS) tools, built on OpenAI’s 2023 GPT-4 large language model and Microsoft Foundry, to summarize transcripts of interviews with asylum applicants and information about their countries of origin, according to documents obtained by ORG. The immigration and law enforcement authority started piloting these tools in late 2024 as the Labour government tried to clear a backlog of around 100,000 asylum cases, while staying on top of the tens of thousands of new applications the UK receives each year. While the department has made significant progress, halving the number of people waiting on an initial decision in the year through June, the number of appeals against decisions has ballooned.
Researchers are concerned about the accuracy of the AI tools–especially to decide something as high-stakes as whether to send someone back to a country where they fear persecution. ORG found that the percentage of summaries generated by the ACS deemed not fit for use—often because they contain factual errors or misrepresentations—is significantly higher than the published 9 percent error rate calculated in the pilot evaluation. There is no quality control for the summaries produced by the APS, it also found.
Asylum decision-makers use the tools to save time when reviewing asylum cases; when used together, the pilot showed the tools could save around an hour per case, according to government estimates. Caseworkers use the ACS to speed up their review of transcripts of interviews where asylum seekers explain how they were persecuted in their country and why they are afraid to return. They use the APS as a search assistant to find and summarize country policy information, which informs them whether the applicant faces a genuine risk of harm in their home country. In July, a UK judge accused the Home Office of citing an “AI hallucinated” document to refuse a Moroccan woman and her child’s asylum claim on the basis that her home country would be safe for her to return to.
“We’re dealing with people’s lives. We’re talking about people that have faced some of the worst circumstances, and we’re meant to be making decisions based on facts and on understanding harm,” Labour backbench MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy tells WIRED. “I just don’t think it’s appropriate that machines are doing that.”
A Home Office spokesperson says, “Use of Artificial Intelligence is just one of the tools at our disposal to protect our borders, and does not replace or automate the role of human decision-makers.”
Ribeiro-Addy, Alsherif, and the Public Law Project, which has separately been investigating the tools, also worry that well-documented “cultural bias” in GPT models could lead to language barriers and the loss of cultural nuances in the summaries, which could in turn result in discriminatory decisions. An OpenAI spokesperson highlighted to WIRED the company’s ongoing work to improve its models’ accuracy and pointed out that the company will be retiring GPT-4 in January.
In the absence of regulation, the UK’s “AI Playbook” mandates that departments must be transparent about the algorithmic tools they use in decision-making processes and make information on them available to the public, including listing those tools on a public repository. The Home Office’s case summarization and policy search tools are not on that list.
Asylum seekers are also not told when these AI tools are used in their case. “Migrant organizations, legal practitioners, not many of them know about the actual use of this tool,” says Alsherif, who leads ORG’s migrant digital justice program. “So we need to let them know about this, let them know how it works, so they can challenge it.” Not being able to contest an incorrect AI summary of their personal information may breach UK data rights laws, Cloisters lawyers wrote in an independent legal opinion commissioned by ORG. The Home Office states that parts of the decision-making process may involve automation in its privacy notice.
Both groups have sent their findings to UK data regulator, the Information Commission, which is currently investigating the Home Office’s refusal to tell ORG how staff use and were trained to use two AI tools.
Public Law Project senior research fellow Caroline Selman also notes that the ACS and APS tools are just two of the 11 high-risk AI systems that her team has found being used across government but absent from the public repository. She’s concerned there may be more deployed across government that even researchers, let alone the individuals they are being used on, are unaware of.
“Other tools are being used but not being publicized at all,” says Selman, “and you can’t even begin to ask questions about things if you don’t know that they’re being used.”
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