The White House Puts New Guardrails on Government Use of AI
WiredMAR 20 2024
The US Treasury Department used artificial intelligence (AI) to recover $1B in check fraud during the 2024 fiscal year, as well as other types of fraud, bringing the total amount recovered to $4B, or six times that recovered last year.
A Treasury official said they used AI to find "hidden patterns" of fraud, though exactly how AI was used was not disclosed. This saved an additional $2.5B by preventing high-risk transactions and $500M from "risk-based" screenings.
While significant progress has been made for the Treasury, which processes an annual 1.4B payments worth $6.9T, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report showed the government still loses between $233B and $521B in fraud every year.
While we must be cautious around these novel technologies, this news should excite every taxpayer who wants their money well cared for and spent. With machine learning, AI can constantly improve its skills to detect patterns of fraud in milliseconds. We'll always need humans to ensure proper use, but with the help of AI, criminals should prepare for a hard road ahead.
While the government offers nice platitudes about using AI for good while restraining its bad aspects, the truth is that the corporations who own these technologies also own the government. The US federal government, which played a significant role in funding AI development, is now handing it over to corporations to control every aspect of our lives.