Guidance ยท Reviewed
AI in investigations
Artificial intelligence is changing how open-source material is found and handled. This guide explains what AI genuinely changes in investigative work, where it fails, and how R6I uses it without sending case material to anyone else's system.
Coverage and speed
What AI changes.
Used properly, AI is a coverage and speed tool. It can triage large volumes of public material quickly, surface candidate connections between sources, help assemble timelines from lawfully obtained records, and transcribe or summarise material so review time goes where it matters. What it changes is the reach of the first pass. It does not change what counts as evidence.
Failure modes
What AI gets wrong.
AI systems make confident errors: they can state specifics that are not in any source. They lose provenance: an answer without a source has no evidentiary value. They conflate people who share names or details - a serious risk in locating and verification work. And they reflect the gaps and biases of whatever they were trained on. None of this makes AI unusable. It makes unverified AI output unusable.
Human verification
The discipline.
AI widens the search; the discipline decides. In R6I casework, AI output is a lead, never a finding. Every AI-surfaced item is verified at the original source before it enters a report, reports cite sources rather than AI output, and conclusions are tested against the evidence the same way any other lead is tested. Generating competing explanations is where AI helps most. Deciding between them stays human work.
Case-material boundary
The private system.
R6I runs its own AI system on hardware it controls, in Australia. Case and subject material processed with AI is processed on that system only. It is not sent to third-party AI services, not stored in overseas AI clouds, and not used to train any model. General drafting and administration that contains no case or subject material may use commercial tools; client matters do not leave the private system.
Lines that do not move
Boundaries.
Some lines do not move. R6I does not use facial recognition. AI is not given access to private accounts and is not used to collect anything a lawful manual search could not. AI does not make findings, assess credibility, or identify people - it proposes; the investigator verifies and decides. And the report is written by the investigator, not generated by a system.
Read OAIC guidance on AI and privacy. This guide is general information, not legal or privacy advice.
General information only
Start with the matter, not the tool.
First contact: your details and the type of matter only.
This guide is not legal or privacy advice. Tasmanian inquiry-agent licence number: TBA.