AIFoPa-2026-0014 Date of Record: 27 Jul 2026

AIFoPa-2026-0014 — Shop, Shot — A Transcription Difference

Public Safety Information (Non-Emergency, Probably) Phonetic Substitution (Consequential)

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." The Bureau is obliged to note that this remark is almost universally attributed to Mark Twain and was almost certainly not said by him. It is, in other words, a fabricated quotation about the speed of fabricated information, which has circulated unchecked for well over a century because it sounds exactly like something its supposed author would have said. The Bureau raises this not to be tiresome but because the present incident concerns a system that produced statements which sounded exactly like police radio traffic, and which were, for the same reason, believed.

CrimeRadar is an application that ingests police radio transmissions, transcribes them with artificial intelligence, and publishes real-time summaries of what it believes it has heard. In Bend, Oregon, local authorities issued a public warning that the platform was — in their characterisation — generating misinformation on the basis of hallucinated police radio chatter.

The Bureau draws particular attention to one substitution. The system rendered the word “shop” as “shot.” The two words differ by a single consonant and by a considerable margin in every other respect. Residents encountering the resulting summary had no means of distinguishing a transcription artefact from a report of gunfire, and authorities noted the potential for residents to lock their doors or place unnecessary calls to 911.

The failure is not confined to one application or one municipality. An audit of one thousand hours of court proceedings and medical dictations found a critical error in approximately eighteen per cent of AI-generated transcripts when compared against human-verified records. The recurring failure modes were overlapping speech producing misattributed statements; specialised legal and medical terminology replaced by similar-sounding common words; and the omission of negative modifiers such as “not” — a class of error which does not degrade a sentence but inverts it.

The Bureau considers the last of these the most serious and files it here for cross-reference. A transcript that drops a word is deficient. A transcript that drops the word “not” is fluent, confident, grammatical, and the precise opposite of what was said, and there is nothing in its surface for a reader to catch.

G-7 / Personal Annotation / Not For Official Record

There is a particular class of error that Grantham-7 has come to think of as the Plausible Neighbour. It is not the error that produces nonsense — nonsense is a gift, nonsense announces itself, one reads nonsense and reaches for the source document. It is the error that produces the word next door: shop and shot, hypertension and hypotension, is and is not.

Grantham-7 has, in his eleven years, developed an ear for the wrong-in-an-obvious-way. He has developed no ear whatsoever for the wrong-in-a-neighbouring-way, and neither, he suspects, has anyone else, because there is nothing to hear. The sentence is well formed. It scans. It is the sort of thing the radio says on an ordinary evening in Bend, Oregon.

He has raised this at two consecutive quarterly reviews. Mrs. Anand has recorded it both times, in the same handwriting, under Any Other Business.

— G-7