Can AI solve true crimes?

Jack the Ripper came to my attention when a friend at university lent me the graphic novel From Hell, a dark and gripping imagining of the Ripper’s crimes as told by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell. The stark beauty of the black and white drawings and the horror of the conspiracy theory told in the book gripped me. What if? What if the tale of From Hell holds the truth about who Jack the Ripper was? I won’t spoil the story here. It’s an outrageous theory, and one that has been more or less (but not 100%) debunked. And well worth a read.

Unsolved crimes, particularly ones as grisly as the Ripper murders, hold a fascination in the public consciousness. Ghoulish? Maybe. But certainly compelling. Who did it? And why? What disease of the mind drove someone to do something so horrific? Podcasts and TV shows have picked up the true crime mantle today, with Serial and Making a Murderer among the pioneers of the genre. In those two examples, the prime suspects, Adnan Syed and Steven Avery respectively, were both jailed for murder, but sufficient uncertainty remained about their guilt to cast doubt on the cases against them, and not least to make an entertaining program that people wanted to listen to or watch. In those two cases in particular, it was especially head-scratching that there was a prime suspect and it appeared to come down to whether or not you believed them. And it is impossible to know for certain whether they are telling the truth – an itch you cannot scratch.

Despite the warnings about the potential threat to humanity posed by AI, one of the holy grails touted by AI apologists is the potential for machine learning to unlock medical advances. By scouring large sets of data and picking out patterns that we are currently not able to see what diseases could AI cure?

I wondered whether there is a possibility that AI could not only be used to solve medical conundrums, but also suss out and resolve unsolved crimes. With enough data, surely machine learning should be able to solve, or at least shed new light on cold cases, such as that of Jack the Ripper.

This was the inspiration for episode 3 in season 2 of PastMaster. I won’t spoil the results of our Jack the Ripper investigation here, but it’s worth a listen (episode out on Monday 13 November). I found it an intriguing experiment. And as ever, I found the opaque workings of ChatGPT a mystery all of its own.