Amazon-hosted AI tool for UK military recruitment ‘carries risk of data breach’

Ministry of Defence says risk with Textio tool is low and robust safeguards' have been put in place by suppliers

An artificial intelligence tool hosted by Amazon and designed to boost UK Ministry of Defence recruitment puts defence personnel at risk of being identified publicly, according to a government assessment.

Data used in the automated Textio system to improve the drafting of defence job adverts and attract more diverse candidates by improving the inclusiveness language, includes names, roles and emails of military personnel and is stored using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US. This means a data breach may have concerning consequences, ie identification of defence personnel", according to documents detailing government AI systems published for the first time today.

The possibility of inappropriate lesson material being generated by a AI-powered lesson-planning tool used by teachers based on Open AI's powerful large language model, GPT-4o. The AI saves teachers time and can personalise lesson plans rapidly in a way that may otherwise not be possible.

Hallucinations" by a chatbot deployed to answer queries about the welfare of children in the family courts. However, it also offers round the clock information and reduces queue times for people who need to speak to a human agent.

Erroneous operation of the code" and incorrect input data" in HM Treasury's new PolicyEngine that uses machine learning to model tax and benefit changes with greater accuracy than existing approaches".

A degradation of human reasoning" if users of an AI to prioritise food hygiene inspection risks become over-reliant on the system. It may also result in consistently scoring establishments of a certain type much lower", but it should also mean faster inspections of places that are more likely to break hygiene rules.