this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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When your mailbag brims with 25,000 letters and emails every day, deciding which to answer first is daunting. When lurking within are pleas for help from some of the country’s most vulnerable people, the stakes only get higher.

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.

...

People who work with benefit claimants are now voicing “serious concerns” about how the system handles sensitive personal data.

Meagan Levin, the policy and public affairs manager at Turn2us, a charity which helps people facing financial insecurity, said the system “raises concerns, particularly around the lack of transparency and its handling of highly sensitive personal data, including medical records and financial details. Processing such information without claimants’ knowledge and consent is deeply troubling.”

According to the information so far released, the data is encrypted before the originals are deleted, and is held by the DWP and its cloud computing provider. The name of the provider is one of many pieces of information about the system that have been redacted.

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[–] Womble@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

There definitely should be more transparency around exactly what is being done, but assumng they are not twisting the truth about it then:

Officials say it is complementary to existing systems, and flags correspondence which is then reviewed by agents to determine whether a correspondent is in fact potentially vulnerable. The DWP said no decision was made by the AI and no data processed by it.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable use case to improve efficiency while keeping people making the decisions.