At the same time that UK political parties vie in their condemnation of the Post Office scandal, they unite in their promotion of AI as the answer to tricky social problems. This means that, in effect, they are arguing for more of the same; for more occasions where computing and bureaucracy combine to mangle the lives ordinary people, but scaled by AI in ways that make Horizon's harms look like small beer.
One thing the Horizon IT system and AI have in common is their fallibility; both are complex systems which generate unpredictable errors. However, while the bugs in Fujitsu's bodged accounting system stem from shoddy software testing, AI's problems are foundational.
Language models like ChatGPT also make unreliable witnesses because they are actually trained to produce untruths. Such systems aren't optimised on facts but on producing output that's plausible (a very different thing). Even when they sound right, they are literally making things up.
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