The Lords Justice and Home Affairs committee said new technologies were being created in a “new Wild West” without the law and public awareness keeping up with developments, warning that the lack of oversight meant “users are in effect making it up as they go along”.
The cross-party group added that while AI has the potential to improve people’s lives, it could have “serious implications” for human rights and civil liberties in the justice system.
“Algorithms are being used to improve crime detection, aid the security categorisation of prisoners, streamline entry clearance processes at our borders and generate new insights that feed into the entire criminal justice pipeline,” the peers said.
The committee added that scrutiny was not ensuring new tools were “safe, necessary, proportionate, and effective”.
According to the group, police forces and other law-enforcement agencies were buying equipment in a “worryingly opaque” market, with details of how systems...