AI facial recognition scanned millions of driver licences. Then an innocent man got locked up

Comments

• rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  AI shouldn’t be anywhere near law enforcement. Including automated pattol software.

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  • EatYouWell@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s not AI, though. They’re just using buzzwords, because what they described is functionally no different from AFIS. It’s just a poorly written algorithm.

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    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’m aware, but unfortunately I’m not big enough in the tech industry to create differentiating terms. AI is an extremely broad term ranging from literal if-else statements to LLMs and generative AI. Unfortunately the specifics usually get buried in the term

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  • MindSkipperBro12@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Don’t be scared of the inevitable

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• catsup@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  TLDR:

  In 2018, a man in a baseball cap stole thousands of dollars worth of watches from a store in central Detroit.

  The AI was trained on a database of mostly white people The photos of people of colour in the dataset were generally of worse quality, as default camera settings are often not optimised to capture darker skin tones.

  Mr Williams’ photo didn’t come up first. In fact, it was the ninth-most-probable match.

  Officers drove to Mr Williams’ house and handcuffed him.

  Then they arrested him in front of his five and two-year-old kids…

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  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Sounds like the same old law enforcement trend; technology deployed as an excuse generator.

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• bear@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The computer didn’t get it wrong; the computer did exactly what it was programmed to do. Blaming the computer implies that this can just be solved with better code, when it was the humans who actually carried out the action. It was the humans who were supposed to exercise their judgment that got it wrong.

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  • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    PICNIC, or PEBKAC.

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• uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Ever since we let law enforcement use facial recognition technology, they’ve been arresting people for false positives, sometimes for long periods of time.

  it’s not just camera problems and being poorly trained regarding non-whites, but that people actually look too much alike, especially when using the tech on blurry low-res security footage,

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  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I used to work in security camera monitoring and I used to think I don’t understand why insurers will touch some of these companies with an electrified cattle prod.

    They will be pretty high value asset companies with valuable stuff on premises that could be stolen, construction equipment, medical equipment, guns, cars, steel copper lead etc. and their security cameras would max out at 720p have a giant spider web on them without fail and would invariably be on some wobbly pole somewhere that was blowing around in the wind causing 300 false positives a minute. We literally used to switch those cameras off.

    Why don’t they insist on equipment that didn’t cost the company $4.50 from Walmart?

    The only cameras we used to work with that were actually any good with number plate recognition cameras, but they were specialist and were absolutely useless for anything else other than number plate recognition. But boy did they get you that number plate.

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• spudwart@spudwart.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The System is functioning as Intended.

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  Facial recognition could analyse a blown-up still taken from a security tape, sift through a database of millions of driver licence photos, and identify the person who did the crime.

  Months later, the facial recognition system used by Detroit police combed through its database of millions of driver licences to identify the criminal in the grainy security tapes.

  By January 2020, as Mr Williams had his mug shot taken in the Detroit detention centre, civil liberties groups knew that black people were being falsely accused due to this technology.

  It would give law enforcement and security agencies quick access to up to 100 million facial images from databases around Australia, including driver licences and passport photos.

  That didn’t stop the then government from ploughing ahead with its planned national facial recognition system, says Edward Santow, an expert on responsible AI at the University of Technology Sydney, and the Australian Human Rights Commissioner at the time.

  Despite this, last month Senate estimates heard the federal police tested a second commercial one-to-many face matching service, Pim Eyes, earlier this year.

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  The original article contains 1,870 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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