Sure,
becoming
an
ICE
agent
sounds
fun,
but
in
between
all
the
tear-gassing
of
clergy
and
shooting
pepper
balls
at
journalists,
the
job
involves
a
lot
of
pesky
paperwork.
I
mean,
the
government
simply
doesn’t
pay
enough
with
its
[checks
notes]
$50,000
signing
bonus,
25
percent
premium
pay,
and
$60,000
in
student
loan
repayment
to
justify
taking
20
minutes
to
write
a
book
report
about
breaking
someone’s
car
window!
After
a
long
day
of
pulling
guns
on
combat
veterans
and
telling
them,
“you’re
dead,
liberal,”
who
has
the
patience
to
sit
down
and
chronicle
these
events
just
because
it’s
the
quote-unquote
“law”?
Fear
not!
Just
fire
up
ChatGPT
and
tell
it
to
turn
its
statistically
significant
word
salad
powers
toward
turning
“picked
up
someone,
idk,
they
looked
vaguely
Mexicanish”
into
an
official,
if
probably
hallucinated,
report.
Because
this
administration
isn’t
just
about
breaking
the
law,
it’s
about
breaking
the
fundamental
concept
of
“effort.”
The
latest
installment
in
Judge
Sara
Ellis’s
seemingly
never-ending
mission
of
reading
the
riot
act
to
the
actual
riot
police,
arrived
as
a
233-page
opinion
that
reads
like
the
tutorial
level
for
a
role-reversed
Wolfenstein
game.
Judge
Ellis’s
account
of
the
Trump
administration’s
ongoing
experiment
with
turning
paramilitary
thugs
loose
on
Chicago
includes
body-cam
footage
contradicting
official
narratives,
false
testimony,
and
the
aforementioned
“agent
rolled
down
his
window,
pointed
a
handgun
out
of
it,
and
said
‘bang
bang’
followed
by
something
like
‘you’re
dead,
liberal.’”
Agents
claimed
protesters
threw
bikes
at
them
(footage
showed
agents
grabbing
and
throwing
the
bikes).
They
said
shields
had
nails
in
them
(footage
showed
cardboard).
They
identified
“Latin
Kings”
by
their
“maroon
hoodies”
(maroon
isn’t
a
Latin
King
color,
and
one
person
in
maroon
was
an
alderman).
And
so
on,
and
so
on.
But
nestled
among
the
higher
voltage
abuses
is
this
gem
of
a
footnote
(flagged
by
the
Chicago
Tribune’s
Jason
Meisner):
The
Court
also
notes
that,
in
at
least
one
instance,
an
agent
asked
ChatGPT
to
compile
a
narrative
for
a
report
based
off
of
a
brief
sentence
about
an
encounter
and
several
images.
Whatever
qualms
one
might
harbor
about
AI-assisted
drafting,
there’s
a
difference
between
asking
a
language
model
to
“help
me
polish
this
memo”
and
and
“here’s
a
picture
and
six
words,
please
brainstorm
why
that
grandmother
shouldn’t
have
mouthed
off
like
that
if
she
didn’t
want
a
billy
club
to
the
solar
plexus.”
A
use-of-force
report
isn’t
a
diary
entry
from
the
front
to
be
read
like
a
“My
Dearest
Emily…”
letter
in
some
future
Ken
Burns
rip-off
documentary
about
the
Great
Siege
of
Michigan
Avenue.
It’s
evidence!
And
this
turns
it
all
into
constitutional
slop.
While
the
justice
system
gnashes
its
teeth
over
a
hallucinated
case
citation,
Trump’s
immigration
goons
have
urged
us
all
to
hold
their
figurative
beer.
To
the
extent
that
agents
use
ChatGPT
to
create
their
use
of
force
reports,
this
further
undermines
their
credibility
and
may
explain
the
inaccuracy
of
these
reports
when
viewed
in
light
of
the
BWC
[body-worn
camera]
footage.
Judge
Ellis
stakes
her
claim
to
the
2025
understatement
of
the
year
trophy.
A
cornerstone
of
America’s
looming
AI
crisis
is
everyone’s
unswerving
belief
that
AI
should
be
used
for
tasks
that
it
absolutely
cannot
perform.
At
the
top
of
the
tech
world,
this
fixation
drives
the
cash-hemorrhaging
effort
to
build
“general
intelligence,”
a
genuine
artificial
person
that
they
can
pretend
would’ve
dated
them
in
high
school.
While
researchers
in
China
are
building
smaller
models
capable
of
handling
the
mundane
writing
and
code
clean-up
tasks
that
AI
can
reliably
handle,
American
AI
companies
are
throwing
exponentially
increasing
resources
toward
diminishing
linear
gains
to
build
a
bot
that
could
achieve
the
private
equity
investor
wet
dream
of
an
economy
with
zero
actual
workers.
But
selling
this
vision
to
the
masses
requires
messianic
messaging
about
AI’s
“potential”
to
shoulder
burdens
that
it’s
incapable
of
shouldering.
AI
is
great
at
cleaning
up
a
run-on
sentence.
Not
so
good
at
coming
up
with
your
whole
motion
to
dismiss
from
scratch.
And
alarmingly,
unconstitutionally
terrible
at
producing
an
accurate
account
of
a
law
enforcement
incident
that
it
didn’t
see
based
off
a
one-sentence
prompt!
The
second
Trump
administration
thrives
upon
“weaponized
laziness.”
The
appointments
are
half-assed,
the
foreign
policy
is
half-assed,
and
the
transportation
policy
is
so
half-assed,
it’s
devolved
into
complaining
that
people
are
dressing
half-assed.
But
unlike
the
passengers
strolling
the
terminal
in
pajamas,
the
Trump
administration’s
half-assery
is
focused
on
the
most
mendacious,
cruel,
and
dangerous
short
cuts
to
life.
Into
this
cretinous
brew,
“ChatGPT
use-of-force
reports”
are
just
another
dog-bites-man
story.
And
in
this
metaphor,
the
dog
is
a
German
Shepherd
K-9
and
the
man
is
an
American
citizen
who
happened
to
be
standing
outside
Home
Depot
at
the
wrong
time.
Like
most
AI
errors,
the
fault
isn’t
with
the
technology,
but
with
the
professional
lapses
involved
in
misusing
it.
ChatGPT
wasn’t
the
one
brake-checking
civilians
to
cause
accidents
as
an
excuse
to
justify
force
or
calling
neighborhood
residents
in
Halloween
costumes
“professional
agitators.”
These
yahoos
ran
a
shoot-first-ask-questions-never
operation
before
ChatGPT
arrived
on
the
scene.
The
irony
that
ICE
is
harassing
people
working
for
a
living
(hat
tip
to
Brett
Kavanaugh
for
the
working
prong
of
the
new
racial
profiling
test)
and
then
outsourcing
its
own
actual
work
to
a
stochastic
parrot
is
appropriately
dystopian.
But
it’s
certainly
lost
on
the
government
driving
this
policy.
Maybe
ChatGPT
can
explain
the
joke
to
them.
Joe
Patrice is
a
senior
editor
at
Above
the
Law
and
co-host
of
Thinking
Like
A
Lawyer.
Feel
free
to email
any
tips,
questions,
or
comments.
Follow
him
on Twitter or
Bluesky
if
you’re
interested
in
law,
politics,
and
a
healthy
dose
of
college
sports
news.
Joe
also
serves
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a
Managing
Director
at
RPN
Executive
Search.