{"id":137565,"date":"2025-11-24T17:47:26","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T01:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/11\/24\/ice-using-chatgpt-to-write-use-of-force-reports-as-fascism-meets-laziness\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T17:47:26","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T01:47:26","slug":"ice-using-chatgpt-to-write-use-of-force-reports-as-fascism-meets-laziness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/11\/24\/ice-using-chatgpt-to-write-use-of-force-reports-as-fascism-meets-laziness\/","title":{"rendered":"ICE Using ChatGPT To Write Use-Of-Force Reports, As Fascism Meets Laziness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sure, becoming an ICE agent sound<\/em>s 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\u2019t pay enough with its [checks notes] $50,000 signing bonus, 25 percent premium pay, and $60,000 in student loan repayment<\/a> to justify taking 20 minutes to write a book report about breaking someone\u2019s car window! After a long day of pulling guns on combat veterans and telling them, \u201cyou\u2019re dead, liberal<\/a>,\u201d who has the patience to sit down and chronicle these events just because it\u2019s the quote-unquote \u201claw\u201d?<\/p>\n

Fear not! Just fire up ChatGPT and tell it to turn its statistically significant word salad powers toward turning \u201cpicked up someone, idk, they looked vaguely Mexicanish\u201d into an official, if probably hallucinated, report.<\/p>\n

Because this administration isn\u2019t just about breaking the law, it\u2019s about breaking the fundamental concept of \u201ceffort.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latest installment in Judge Sara Ellis\u2019s seemingly never-ending<\/a> mission of reading the riot act to the actual riot police, arrived as a 233-page opinion<\/a> that reads like the tutorial level for a role-reversed Wolfenstein<\/em> game. Judge Ellis\u2019s account of the Trump administration\u2019s ongoing experiment with turning paramilitary thugs loose on Chicago includes body-cam footage contradicting official narratives, false testimony, and the aforementioned \u201cagent rolled down his window, pointed a handgun out of it, and said \u2018bang bang\u2019 followed by something like \u2018you\u2019re dead, liberal.’\u201d 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 \u201cLatin Kings\u201d by their \u201cmaroon hoodies\u201d (maroon isn\u2019t a Latin King color, and one person in maroon was an alderman).<\/p>\n

And so on, and so on.<\/p>\n

But nestled among the higher voltage abuses is this gem of a footnote (flagged by the Chicago Tribune\u2019s Jason Meisner<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whatever qualms one might harbor about AI-assisted drafting, there\u2019s a difference between asking a language model to \u201chelp me polish this memo\u201d and and \u201chere\u2019s a picture and six words, please brainstorm why that grandmother shouldn\u2019t have mouthed off like that if she didn\u2019t want a billy club to the solar plexus.\u201d A use-of-force report isn\u2019t a diary entry from the front to be read like a \u201cMy Dearest Emily\u2026\u201d letter in some future Ken Burns rip-off documentary about the Great Siege of Michigan Avenue. It\u2019s evidence! And this turns it all into constitutional slop.<\/p>\n

While the justice system gnashes its teeth<\/a> over a hallucinated case citation, Trump\u2019s immigration goons have urged us all to hold their figurative beer.<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Judge Ellis stakes her claim to the 2025 understatement of the year trophy.<\/p>\n

A cornerstone of America\u2019s looming AI crisis is everyone\u2019s 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 \u201cgeneral intelligence,\u201d a genuine artificial person that they can pretend would\u2019ve 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<\/a> to build a bot that could achieve the private equity investor wet dream of an economy with zero actual workers. <\/p>\n

But selling this vision to the masses requires messianic messaging about AI\u2019s \u201cpotential\u201d to shoulder burdens that it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

And alarmingly, unconstitutionally terrible at producing an accurate account of a law enforcement incident that it didn\u2019t see<\/em> based off a one-sentence prompt!<\/p>\n

The second Trump administration thrives upon \u201cweaponized laziness.\u201d The appointments are half-assed<\/a>, the foreign policy is half-assed<\/a>, and the transportation policy is so half-assed, it\u2019s devolved into complaining that people are dressing half-assed<\/a>. But unlike the passengers strolling the terminal in pajamas, the Trump administration\u2019s half-assery is focused on the most mendacious, cruel, and dangerous short cuts to life. Into this cretinous brew, \u201cChatGPT use-of-force reports\u201d are just another dog-bites-man story. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Like most AI errors, the fault isn\u2019t with the technology, but with the professional lapses involved in misusing it. ChatGPT wasn\u2019t the one brake-checking civilians to cause accidents as an excuse to justify force or calling neighborhood residents in Halloween costumes \u201cprofessional agitators.\u201d These yahoos ran a shoot-first-ask-questions-never operation before ChatGPT arrived on the scene.<\/p>\n

The irony that ICE is harassing people working for a living (hat tip to Brett Kavanaugh for the working prong<\/a> of the new racial profiling test) and then outsourcing its own actual work to a stochastic parrot is appropriately dystopian. But it\u2019s certainly lost on the government driving this policy. <\/p>\n

Maybe ChatGPT can explain the joke to them.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The post ICE Using ChatGPT To Write Use-Of-Force Reports, As Fascism Meets Laziness<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Sure, becoming an ICE agent sound<\/em>s 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\u2019t pay enough with its [checks notes] $50,000 signing bonus, 25 percent premium pay, and $60,000 in student loan repayment<\/a> to justify taking 20 minutes to write a book report about breaking someone\u2019s car window! After a long day of pulling guns on combat veterans and telling them, \u201cyou\u2019re dead, liberal<\/a>,\u201d who has the patience to sit down and chronicle these events just because it\u2019s the quote-unquote \u201claw\u201d?<\/p>\n

Fear not! Just fire up ChatGPT and tell it to turn its statistically significant word salad powers toward turning \u201cpicked up someone, idk, they looked vaguely Mexicanish\u201d into an official, if probably hallucinated, report.<\/p>\n

Because this administration isn\u2019t just about breaking the law, it\u2019s about breaking the fundamental concept of \u201ceffort.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latest installment in Judge Sara Ellis\u2019s seemingly never-ending<\/a> mission of reading the riot act to the actual riot police, arrived as a 233-page opinion<\/a> that reads like the tutorial level for a role-reversed Wolfenstein<\/em> game. Judge Ellis\u2019s account of the Trump administration\u2019s ongoing experiment with turning paramilitary thugs loose on Chicago includes body-cam footage contradicting official narratives, false testimony, and the aforementioned \u201cagent rolled down his window, pointed a handgun out of it, and said \u2018bang bang\u2019 followed by something like \u2018you\u2019re dead, liberal.’\u201d 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 \u201cLatin Kings\u201d by their \u201cmaroon hoodies\u201d (maroon isn\u2019t a Latin King color, and one person in maroon was an alderman).<\/p>\n

And so on, and so on.<\/p>\n

But nestled among the higher voltage abuses is this gem of a footnote (flagged by the Chicago Tribune\u2019s Jason Meisner<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whatever qualms one might harbor about AI-assisted drafting, there\u2019s a difference between asking a language model to \u201chelp me polish this memo\u201d and and \u201chere\u2019s a picture and six words, please brainstorm why that grandmother shouldn\u2019t have mouthed off like that if she didn\u2019t want a billy club to the solar plexus.\u201d A use-of-force report isn\u2019t a diary entry from the front to be read like a \u201cMy Dearest Emily\u2026\u201d letter in some future Ken Burns rip-off documentary about the Great Siege of Michigan Avenue. It\u2019s evidence! And this turns it all into constitutional slop.<\/p>\n

While the justice system gnashes its teeth<\/a> over a hallucinated case citation, Trump\u2019s immigration goons have urged us all to hold their figurative beer.<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Judge Ellis stakes her claim to the 2025 understatement of the year trophy.<\/p>\n

A cornerstone of America\u2019s looming AI crisis is everyone\u2019s 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 \u201cgeneral intelligence,\u201d a genuine artificial person that they can pretend would\u2019ve 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<\/a> to build a bot that could achieve the private equity investor wet dream of an economy with zero actual workers. <\/p>\n

But selling this vision to the masses requires messianic messaging about AI\u2019s \u201cpotential\u201d to shoulder burdens that it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

And alarmingly, unconstitutionally terrible at producing an accurate account of a law enforcement incident that it didn\u2019t see<\/em> based off a one-sentence prompt!<\/p>\n

The second Trump administration thrives upon \u201cweaponized laziness.\u201d The appointments are half-assed<\/a>, the foreign policy is half-assed<\/a>, and the transportation policy is so half-assed, it\u2019s devolved into complaining that people are dressing half-assed<\/a>. But unlike the passengers strolling the terminal in pajamas, the Trump administration\u2019s half-assery is focused on the most mendacious, cruel, and dangerous short cuts to life. Into this cretinous brew, \u201cChatGPT use-of-force reports\u201d are just another dog-bites-man story. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Like most AI errors, the fault isn\u2019t with the technology, but with the professional lapses involved in misusing it. ChatGPT wasn\u2019t the one brake-checking civilians to cause accidents as an excuse to justify force or calling neighborhood residents in Halloween costumes \u201cprofessional agitators.\u201d These yahoos ran a shoot-first-ask-questions-never operation before ChatGPT arrived on the scene.<\/p>\n

The irony that ICE is harassing people working for a living (hat tip to Brett Kavanaugh for the working prong<\/a> of the new racial profiling test) and then outsourcing its own actual work to a stochastic parrot is appropriately dystopian. But it\u2019s certainly lost on the government driving this policy. <\/p>\n

Maybe ChatGPT can explain the joke to them.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

1<\/strong> 2<\/a>Next \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t pay enough with its [checks notes] $50,000 signing bonus, 25 percent premium pay, and $60,000 in student loan repayment to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}