gnollgirl:

biglawbear:

AI helped Uncle Sam catch $1 billion of fraud in one year. And it’s just getting started | CNN Business

New York

CNN

The federal government’s bet on using artificial intelligence to fight financial crime appears to be paying off.

Machine learning AI helped the US Treasury Department to sift through massive amounts of data and recover $1 billion worth of check fraud in fiscal 2024 alone, according to new estimates shared first with CNN. That’s nearly triple what the Treasury recovered in the prior fiscal year.

…

To be sure, Treasury is not using generative AI, the kind that has captivated users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini by generating images, crafting song lyrics and answering complex questions (even though it still sometimes struggles with simple queries).

Instead, the fraud detection efforts rely on machine learning, the subset of AI that excels at analyzing vast amounts of data, and making decisions and predictions based on what it’s learned.

AI can be very helpful in fighting financial crime by combing can through almost endless streams of data and detecting subtle patterns – all in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do it. Experts say that once sophisticated AI models are trained, they can sniff out suspicious transactions in mere milliseconds.

Huh, go figure. Machine learning has been around a lot longer than GenAI and I’ve been seeing applications in detecting financial fraud for nearly ten years. But this is really interesting and encouraging to see it used on a wide scale.

Reasons this isn’t problematic in the way that ChatGPT and the other machine learning things we diss are:

1. This is using a small, focused dataset to do one specific thing.
2. This isn’t using anyone else’s work without permission (or with scummy ‘opt-out’ permission)
3. Because it is small and focused it uses considerably less effort and power.
4. This is actually what AI is about. Doing things that are tedious for people to do, and providing the information for people to comb through and make decisions with.

In short: This is good, actually. And, speaking as someone who is in the accounting field, this is also genuinely a good thing for pretty much everyone. It’s not just fraud, but also terrorists, drug cartels, various other forms of trafficking.