It can't pop soon enough.
‘Serious concerns’ about DWP’s use of AI to read correspondence from benefit claimants
The DWP apparently thinks it can shovel everything into the magic AI machine and it'll do everything for them:
That is the challenge facing the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as correspondence floods in from benefit applicants and claimants – of which there are more than 20 million, including pensioners, in the UK. The DWP thinks it may have found a solution in using artificial intelligence to read it all first – including handwritten missives.
Human reading used to take weeks and could leave the most vulnerable people waiting for too long for help. But “white mail” is an AI that can do the same work in a day and supposedly prioritise the most vulnerable cases for officials to get to first.
By implication, it deprioritises other people, so its accuracy and how it reaches its judgments count, but both matters remain opaque. Despite a ministerial mandate, it is one of numerous public sector algorithms yet to be logged on the transparency register for central government AIs.
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An internal data protection impact assessment said letter writers “do not need to know about their involvement in the initiative”.
The assessment says correspondence can include national insurance numbers, dates of birth, addresses, telephone details, email addresses, details of benefit claims, health information, bank account details, racial and sexual characteristics, and details on children such as their dates of birth and any special needs.
People who work with benefit claimants are now voicing “serious concerns” about how the system handles sensitive personal data.