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UK Home Office May Face Investigation Over Use of OpenAI Tech

A UK government watchdog is considering an investigation into the Home Office’s use of generative AI tools to process asylum applications, WIRED has learned. The potential probe follows lawmakers and researchers publicly questioning the tools’ accuracy and the government’s secrecy around their use.

据《连线》（WIRED）获悉，英国政府监管机构正在考虑对内政部使用生成式人工智能工具处理庇护申请的行为展开调查。此前，立法者和研究人员曾公开质疑这些工具的准确性以及政府在使用过程中的保密做法。

The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), which monitors the Home Office’s management of borders, immigration, and customs, has asked digital rights nonprofit Open Rights Group (ORG) to share more information on the tools as it draws up plans for the topics it will inspect next year, campaigner Sara Alsherif tells WIRED. ORG’s findings come from a six-month investigation into the tools, which involved 11 parliamentary questions, two ministerial letters, and 10 public records requests that attempt to pry details from the Home Office, which has withheld details on the tools.

负责监督内政部边境、移民和海关管理的独立边境与移民首席监察员（ICIBI）已要求数字权利非营利组织“开放权利组织”（ORG）分享有关这些工具的更多信息，以便其制定明年的检查计划。活动人士萨拉·阿尔谢里夫（Sara Alsherif）向《连线》透露，ORG的调查结果源于为期六个月的深入研究，其中包括11次议会质询、两封部长级信函以及10次旨在从内政部获取细节的公共记录请求，而内政部此前一直对这些工具的细节守口如瓶。

The ICIBI tells WIRED it cannot confirm what topics are under active consideration before it publishes its annual inspection priorities, but it says it is aware of concerns about the use of AI tools and pointed to its findings last year that one of the tool’s “effectiveness and reliability were varied.”

ICIBI告诉《连线》，在发布年度检查重点之前，无法确认哪些议题正在积极考虑中，但表示已意识到有关使用人工智能工具的担忧，并指出其去年的调查结果显示，其中一种工具的“有效性和可靠性参差不齐”。

“Asylum decisions are made by trained caseworkers, with AI tools used only to assist in navigating interview records and policy information. They cannot be used in isolation and do not make decisions on claims,” a Home Office spokesperson tells WIRED in an email. “We regularly monitor the performance of these tools alongside our established quality-assurance processes, and have already committed to publishing updated evaluations on their roll out.”

内政部发言人在一封电子邮件中告诉《连线》：“庇护决定由受过培训的个案工作者做出，人工智能工具仅用于辅助查阅面试记录和政策信息。它们不能单独使用，也不会对申请做出决定。我们会在既定的质量保证流程之外，定期监测这些工具的性能，并已承诺发布关于其推广情况的最新评估。”

The Home Office uses the Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS) and Asylum Policy Search (APS) tools, built on OpenAI’s 2023 GPT-4 large language model and Microsoft Foundry, to summarize transcripts of interviews with asylum applicants and information about their countries of origin, according to documents obtained by ORG. The immigration and law enforcement authority started piloting these tools in late 2024 as the Labour government tried to clear a backlog of around 100,000 asylum cases, while staying on top of the tens of thousands of new applications the UK receives each year. While the department has made significant progress, halving the number of people waiting on an initial decision in the year through June, the number of appeals against decisions has ballooned.

根据ORG获得的文件，内政部使用基于OpenAI 2023年GPT-4大语言模型和Microsoft Foundry构建的“庇护案件摘要”（ACS）和“庇护政策搜索”（APS）工具，来总结庇护申请人的面试记录及其原籍国信息。移民和执法部门于2024年底开始试用这些工具，当时工党政府正试图清理约10万起积压的庇护案件，同时应对英国每年收到的数万份新申请。尽管该部门取得了显著进展，在截至6月的一年中将等待初步决定的人数减少了一半，但针对裁决的上诉数量却激增。

Researchers are concerned about the accuracy of the AI tools–especially to decide something as high-stakes as whether to send someone back to a country where they fear persecution. ORG found that the percentage of summaries generated by the ACS deemed not fit for use—often because they contain factual errors or misrepresentations—is significantly higher than the published 9 percent error rate calculated in the pilot evaluation. There is no quality control for the summaries produced by the APS, it also found.

研究人员对人工智能工具的准确性感到担忧，特别是在决定是否将某人遣返回其担心遭受迫害的国家这样高风险的问题上。ORG发现，ACS生成的被认为不适合使用的摘要比例（通常是因为包含事实错误或歪曲信息）远高于试点评估中公布的9%的错误率。此外，该组织还发现，APS生成的摘要没有任何质量控制。

Asylum decision-makers use the tools to save time when reviewing asylum cases; when used together, the pilot showed the tools could save around an hour per case, according to government estimates. Caseworkers use the ACS to speed up their review of transcripts of interviews where asylum seekers explain how they were persecuted in their country and why they are afraid to return. They use the APS as a search assistant to find and summarize country policy information, which informs them whether the applicant faces a genuine risk of harm in their home country. In July, a UK judge accused the Home Office of citing an “AI hallucinated” document to refuse a Moroccan woman and her child’s asylum claim on the basis that her home country would be safe for her to return to.

庇护决策者使用这些工具是为了在审查案件时节省时间；据政府估计，试点显示这些工具合用时每起案件可节省约一小时。个案工作者使用ACS来加快审查面试记录的速度，在这些记录中，庇护申请人解释了他们在国内如何受到迫害以及为何不敢返回。他们将APS作为搜索助手来查找和总结国家政策信息，从而判断申请人在其祖国是否面临真正的伤害风险。今年7月，一位英国法官指责内政部引用了一份“人工智能幻觉”生成的文件，以摩洛哥妇女及其子女的原籍国对其而言是安全的为由，拒绝了她们的庇护申请。

“We’re dealing with people’s lives. We are talking about people that have faced some of the worst circumstances, and we’re meant to be making decisions based on facts and on understanding harm,” Labour backbench MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy tells WIRED. “I just don’t think it’s appropriate that machines are doing that.”

工党后座议员贝尔·里贝罗-阿迪（Bell Ribeiro-Addy）告诉《连线》：“我们处理的是人们的生活。我们谈论的是那些经历过最恶劣处境的人，我们本应基于事实和对伤害的理解来做出决定。我只是认为让机器来做这些事是不合适的。”

A Home Office spokesperson says, “Use of Artificial Intelligence is just one of the tools at our disposal to protect our borders, and does not replace or automate the role of human decision-makers.”

内政部发言人表示：“使用人工智能只是我们保护边境的工具之一，它不会取代或自动化人类决策者的角色。”

Ribeiro-Addy, Alsherif, and the Public Law Project, which has separately been investigating the tools, also worry that well-documented “cultural bias” in GPT models could lead to language barriers and the loss of cultural nuances in the summaries, which could in turn result in discriminatory decisions. An OpenAI spokesperson highlighted to WIRED the company’s ongoing work to improve its models’ accuracy and pointed out that the company will be retiring GPT-4 in January.

里贝罗-阿迪、阿尔谢里夫以及一直在独立调查这些工具的“公共法律项目”（Public Law Project）还担心，GPT模型中记录在案的“文化偏见”可能导致语言障碍，并使摘要丢失文化细微差别，进而可能导致歧视性决策。OpenAI发言人向《连线》强调了公司为提高模型准确性所做的持续努力，并指出公司将于1月停用GPT-4。

In the absence of regulation, the UK’s “AI Playbook” mandates that departments must be transparent about the algorithmic tools they use in decision-making processes and make information on them available to the public, including listing those tools on a public repository. The Home Office’s case summarization and policy search tools are not on that list.

在缺乏监管的情况下，英国的《人工智能手册》规定，各部门必须对其在决策过程中使用的算法工具保持透明，并向公众提供相关信息，包括在公共存储库中列出这些工具。内政部的案件摘要和政策搜索工具并未出现在该列表中。

Asylum seekers are also not told when these AI tools are used in their case. “Migrant organizations, legal practitioners, not many of them know about the actual use of this tool,” says Alsherif, who leads ORG’s migrant digital justice program. “So we need to let them know about this, let them know how it works, so they can challenge it.” Not being able to contest an incorrect AI summary of their personal information may breach UK data rights laws, Cloisters lawyers wrote in an independent legal opinion commissioned by ORG. The Home Office states that parts of the decision-making process may involve automation in its privacy notice.

庇护申请人也不会被告知他们的案件何时使用了这些人工智能工具。领导ORG移民数字正义项目的阿尔谢里夫说：“移民组织、法律从业者，他们中没多少人知道这个工具的实际使用情况。所以我们需要让他们知道这一点，让他们了解它是如何运作的，这样他们才能提出质疑。”Cloisters律师事务所在一份受ORG委托的独立法律意见书中写道，无法对错误的人工智能个人信息摘要提出异议，可能违反了英国的数据权利法。内政部在其隐私声明中指出，决策过程的部分环节可能涉及自动化。

Both groups have sent their findings to UK data regulator, the Information Commission, which is currently investigating the Home Office’s refusal to tell ORG how staff use and were trained to use two AI tools. Public Law Project senior research fellow Caroline Selman also

这两个组织已将其调查结果发送给英国数据监管机构——信息专员办公室（ICO），该机构目前正在调查内政部拒绝向ORG透露其工作人员如何使用以及如何接受培训以使用这两种人工智能工具的行为。公共法律项目高级研究员卡罗琳·塞尔曼（Caroline Selman）也……