SS and AI. What do we think of this then?

What I find most scary is that people are treating ChatGPT as an authority when they want to know something.

Creating them via a form of AI (machine learning) is not the same as them being AI. In their execution, there is no "intelligence" there at all - it's just statistical probabilities.

Yes, strictly speaking, they can be considered AI, but not in the general population's current understanding of it (ie something on the path to AGI). LLMs are about as close to AGI as a fly is to a rocket. Yes, the fly will seemingly make progress towards the eventual goal relative to our viewpoint, but it will never ever get to the moon, and its existence is irrelevant to the process of building something that will.

Incorrect.

LLMs are a form of generative AI. Most were originally trained via machine learning.

I think people should change the way they think about AI. You give it data, and your input is training it.

I don't agree, perhaps it's the type of work I do but I'm literally meaning something that can record that I made a phonecall to X at Y time to say I would be coming to see them on Z date without me having to do it myself. Or automatically copy an email I sent with the persons name in the subject line into their electronic record so that I don't have to save the email first and then manually add it old school style as an attachment into their record.

Which would leave me more time to use my brain space type up better quality holistic assessments and do face to face visits.

@hatgirl I think though that spending time writing up notes of calls, emails, and meetings, is very important. Sometimes it's the best way to review and think through the information gained and better understand the situation of the family or individual in need.

One of the reasons things are missed or people in need fall through gaps is the lack of holistic help. Holistic - including the need for the social worker to be fully involved in all stages of the work.

Of course that requires better funding and more staff - and better training and management. But that's what is needed. It costs less in the end - because failing services leave people in more need of support and for longer periods.

Not read the article but as a social worker for adults I would bloody love it if there was an AI solution to writing up all the phonecalls I had made and transferring emails I had sent onto people's records so I didn't spend hours a week summarising or copying and pasting across.

Where appropriate we already use the recording and transcript function in Microsoft Teams to record meetings now. The transcript is a long way off being able to be used as a completed set of minutes but it does mean that accurate and succinct minutes can be produced after the meeting has concluded.

ML is AI, but AI is not ML. As I said, they are two very different things - or, more accurately, ML is a subset of AI.

Yes, absolutely - these things should always be run in limited trials. However, my issue is with:

a) the criteria used to evaluate it
b) who set those criteria
c) who will be measuring the system against those criteria, and
d) who will be making the final go/no-go decision

Remember, this is civil service. They've outsourced the system itself, meaning that they don't have the requisite skills to build one or manage the build of one, so it's a reasonable conclusion that they probably also lack the skills with which to evaluate one (AI evaluation is a really specialised area, which requires deep knowledge of the subject matter).

I can also almost guarantee that (b) will be a contractor, (c) will be somebody in-house who's done some form of 2-3 day course related to AI, and (d) will be a committee of upper-tier management whose only expertise in the area will be what the salesdroids for the system have told them, and will probably inappropriately factor in cost savings at some point along the line.

I can't see this going well at all.

@ntmdino ML is AI.

As long as the data used is protected within the enterprise/organisation boundaries database or CMDB and fact checking is done I don't see the issue.

It's saves me a lot of time. Efficiency gains are really important in specific jobs with high workloads.

I think an important part of the note taking and reviewing is just that - an opportunity to review the information and notes. Although the actual meetings with clients is important, so is spending time reviewing and writing notes. It helps the social worker think through the situation and focus on something they might otherwise miss or overlook or misunderstand.

Already a problem with some SS departments is outsourcing initial contact to call centres with untrained customer service staff doing the vital initial contact.

The job needs to be holistic and in-house.

AI is a game changer in my profession. It takes the heavy work away and allows more time for the human touch where it is needed - at the client (or customer/ patient/ consumer) level. It speeds up transactions and increases profits.

But rely on it, without the human touch and it is a business disaster.

Re: When they're used to save time by people who are already skilled enough to do the job in the first place

That is one of the main problems currently with SS. Underfunding and insufficient lack of accountability means some are poorly run and with badly trained and/or staff simply not up to, or inappropriate for, the job.

Also, I would be concerned in sensitive areas like social work that AI tends to perpetuate human bias - whereas (you would hope) actual social workers are more trained and experienced to see the nuances of a particular situation. Social work has an overrepresentation of families who are low income, BAME, single mothers, mental health difficulties, low education

Ironically this is a both-ways issue - the lack of nuances, and reliance on stereotypes. It leads to those not considered "the usual" type in need of help often left without support. Happened to someone I know. On the surface middle class etc but because of DV no money of her own. Many families (and individuals) like her are often in hidden or ignored need - and sometimes not helped appropriately or at all by SS due to bias (conscious or subconscious).

Agree the work needs a human - with the ability to understand nuance and complex situations. That said, currently, that's often not the case. My friend described the people she encountered at SS as talking and behaving like robots - with rigid and narrow mindsets and a lack of ability to understand nuance, or complex situations or needs. Heavily reliant on stereotypes, and lacking essential qualities for SS - empathy and compassion.

There's a need for better - and better trained - human staff.

Separately:
The problem comes when they're used to replace humans in an interaction chain
At a time when there's complaints about "worklessness" and the "need to get people off benefits", how will people find jobs if they're being replaced by AI? This issue actually is related in some ways to the work of SS. Because poverty and unemployment increases the risks of someone falling into struggles that eventually need support from social services.

Agreed.

It's a trial. You need to see if the system works or not. AI tools exist, you can't ignore them. You can test them and see if they are suitable. Which is what's happening here. Isn't it better than brining them in without testing? Or missing out on a potentially better system?

It's unlikely the data collection is an intrinsic part of the AI - there may be additional functionality to do that (for quality purposes), but that's entirely controllable by the provider, and thus can be prohibited or controlled in the contract as it would with any third-party system provider.

Are there any privacy concerns with this? I'd assume the AI is collecting data. I wouldn't assume all the data it collects can be anonymised.

AI has its uses, for sure, but it comes with potential problems. My employer uses expert IT contractors to write original material for very sensitive projects precisely because their expertise is necessary. Their contract specifies no AI. Recently, one contractor used AI to produce stuff, and as a result, the whole project had to be paused, the contractor was dismissed (and will never work for my employer again), and because some of the sensitive material has now been fed into the AI corpus, the whole project may have to be abandoned, at enormous cost in time and money.

As IT specialists, we can identify AI produced material very easily, so the contractor was monumentally stupid as well as lazy and dishonest.

If it's used with guidelines and boundaries and stops social workers (and other professionals) having to spend so much time sitting at a desk often duplicating the same information across multiple platforms (you wouldn't believe how awful a lot of the systems are and how many forms you have to fill for various things) and frees up time for professionals to spend more time with families, or with vulnerable or dangerous people where they will gather more information than they can be, pick up on things because they've got an hour to spend not twenty minutes, build more effective relationships to keep people engaged with services and interventions I think it can be a good thing.

Of course, that's the opposite problem - I've always said that if your job can be replaced by an AI, then you can't have been that good at the job in the first place.

If any AI can do the job better than any given human, then the recruitment practices really need to be revised.

Sure, fully evaluate and carefully delimit the use of AI tools in such a sensitive and high-impact area, with ongoing checks.

But do similar evaluations on real-world human efforts, too (i.e. what they produce day to day, under all the pressures they're usually subject to, and preferably without the knowledge that they're being assessed, if possible). The absolute shite I've seen people in SW, MH and similar sectors write up on occasion, it's clear they barely listened, let alone understood to the extent they could write an accurate and useful summary. And that's on the occasions they bothered to write anything.

It's worrying that the social services are so underfunded they need to resort to this, although I think there can be positives.

As an extra on top it can be useful. For example, DH works for a computer game company and their community managers have been using AI to analyse threads on the fan forums, subreddits etc to find out what kinds of problems, suggestions, complaints, confusion etc people have about the game and they can then use this to inform what changes they make. Previously the community managers would read and get involved in some fan forums but it would be more than a full time job to read every single post ever made about the game. Whereas the AI can do that 24/7. So as well as the actual human involvement in the community, the company has the info of what discussions are going on as well.

So for example, for social work, if a human is minuting the meeting but then the AI looks at the transcript and makes its own summary and this is compared to the human-made minutes, that makes sense because it's extra on top, and the AI might pick up on things that the human missed.

Whereas if the AI is replacing the human minuting then you don't know if it's the one missing things. Also, I would be concerned in sensitive areas like social work that AI tends to perpetuate human bias - whereas (you would hope) actual social workers are more trained and experienced to see the nuances of a particular situation. Social work has an overrepresentation of families who are low income, BAME, single mothers, mental health difficulties, low education etc. It is crucial that they are treated fairly and not held up to classist, racist, sexist, ableist norms. (Of course, I know this doesn't always happen anyway. But good social workers ARE aware of these biases and work hard to counteract them - AI would not necessarily have that lean.)

I don't see a problem with AI drafting letters - this tends to be good - as long as a human checks it for accuracy and mistakes particularly with the most important points. Different LLMs do better and worse at this. GMail has just added one and the summaries it gives me of email chains are usually inaccurate - it's not useful at all.

To me it's more of an indication that social services are underfunded as said - it doesn't matter in the slightest if a video game makes improvements which don't please all of the players. Whereas mistakes in social work affect people's real lives deeply and can cause or prevent trauma or even death. We should be funding them adequately so that humans can do the job well, rather than needing AI to do it (though maybe - just maybe - it would help in the sense that one big complaint of jobs like social workers, teachers, police over recent years is that they have to spend more time on paperwork than actually working with the people they want to make a difference with?)

Yeah I came back to say that used as described above it saves so much time