There’s some kind of Jedi mindtrick with technology that causes people to hyper-fixate on the idea of futuristic miracle tools, and ignore the horrible real life results. If I sold hammers that magically transformed into an ineffective plastic toy hammer on 7 out of every 10 strikes, nobody would buy it. They probably would for the novelty, but not for practical use.
I was listening to a podcast episode that was talking about AI-based face recognition and how it’s being used.
The way it works, you take your shitty, off-center still from a security camera showing the suspect at an odd angle, and you feed it into the AI. The AI searches all the images it has access to to find people who look like the suspect.
Police take the results, pick up the person from that list that they think is the closest match, then they put them in front of a line-up, and ask the witnesses to identify the person who committed the crime. Once they have a positive ID, they use that to charge and convict the suspect.
The problem, of course, is that the AI is just finding people who look like the suspect. If they use the tool correctly, they would do some investigation to determine if there is any chance that anyone identified by the AI could actually be the suspect. Instead, they treat it like the AI identified the specific person they were looking for.
One example they used was a woman who was arrested. They arrested her despite the woman in the video not being pregnant and the woman they arrested being about 8 months along.
The good news is that with this data it makes fighting charges based on flock data slightly easier.
Now, that’s a cherry on top of a shit Sunday, but at least there’s a little whipped cream between the shit and the cherry. (The whipped cream is the ACLU)
I’ve been the victim of this. Got a speeding ticket, and I didn’t live within 100 miles of the location. I had to deal with a frustrating process of calling them.
The car wasn’t even remotely similar to mine. The plate was totally different as well.
Bunch of fucking bullshit.
Roseville is the city.
I was confused because there’s a place named California City!
Local police: “let’s just install four times as many to compensate for this error rate!”
