AI Police Report Claims Cop Turned Into Frog

Artificial intelligence may be figuratively reshaping police work, but in one Utah city it briefly tried to reshape an officer into a fairy-tale amphibian. Heber City police say an AI report-writing tool recently produced a document claiming an officer had transformed into a frog—courtesy not of sorcery, but of Disney. Sgt. Rick Keel tells FOX 13 that the software apparently picked up audio from the movie The Princess and the Frog, which was playing in the background of the officer's body camera footage. The glitch, he said, taught the department "the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports."

The department is piloting two systems: Draft One, which produced the frog episode, and Code Four, a newer tool built by 19-year-old MIT dropouts George Cheng and Dylan Nguyen. Draft One was released by Axon, the company that makes the Taser stun gun, UPI reports. Both programs generate written reports from body camera video, an increasingly attractive option for agencies swamped with paperwork. In a ride-along demonstration, Code Four produced a time-stamped report from a staged traffic stop and can operate in English and Spanish while tracking tone and sentiment in conversations.

Keel says the software is already shaving hours off his weekly workload—cutting report-writing time that typically runs one to two hours per incident. He estimates he's saving six to eight hours a week and describes the tools as easy to use despite not seeing himself as particularly tech-oriented. But Forbes reports some are raising concerns with the idea of using AI in police work, despite the fact that the companies involved stress that human oversight is still needed before police reports are finalized. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned in an investigation last year that Draft One "seems deliberately designed to avoid audits," noting it's difficult to tell which parts of a report are AI-generated and which are human-generated.