[whack]

> According to the court documents, the Fargo detective working the case then looked at Lipps' social media accounts and Tennessee driver's license photo. In his charging document, the detective wrote that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle and color.

> Once they were in hand, Fargo police met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had already been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time police interviewed her.

How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it. And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.

There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people. Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman, maybe we should look instead at the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility, and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.

[rglover]

> How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it.

Because we're seeing the first instances of what reality looks like with AI in the hands of the average bear. Just like the excuse was "but the computer said it was correct," now we're just shifting to "but the AI said it was correct."

Don't underestimate how much authority and thinking people will delegate to machines. Not to mention the lengths they'll go to weasel out of taking responsibility for a screw up like this (saw another comment in this thread about the Chief of Police stepping down but it being framed as "retirement").

[mrweasel]

It's only recently some have come to terms with the fact that DNA evidence sometimes returns false positives. Society, and law enforcement, assumed that DNA was infallible. No one apparently wondered millions of people could be reduced to a tiny number of genetic markers apparently having no overlap.

Danish police had to redo 20.000 DNA tests with a larger set of markeres begin tested, because they jailed someone based solely on a DNA test and did consider that they might have gotten the wrong person, despite the DNA match. It's essentially a human hash collision.

Identification by AI is going to be the same, except worse, because it's frankly less scientific. Law enforcement, the judicial system and especially the public is simply to uninterested in learning the limitations of these types of systems. Even in the more civilized part of the world police would love to just have the computer tell them who to pick up and where.

[Gibbon1]

There was a man arrested in Santa Clara county because his DNA was tracked to a murder scene by the paramedics that treated him before they were called to the scene of the murder. He only got away with it because the public defender realized that he was in the hospitals detox at the time of the murder.

[lotsofpulp]

Typically, the “it” in the phrase “got away with it” refers to an action that broke the rules.

[fsckboy]

he only got away from it (it being the allegation)

[jackyinger]

“Got off” would be more appropriate

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

"got off" implies he was guilty but got away with it. I'd say "vindicated" or "absolved" fit the bill here.

[RobotToaster]

DNA can also be completely faked https://www.technologyreview.com/2009/08/17/210960/how-dna-e...

[hpdigidrifter]

Closed source DNA testing software and hardware is a travesty imo

[crashbunny]

not the first instance.

This was 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPUBXN2Fd_E&t=19s

A dude in the usa was arrested in a casino by police because the casino's facial recognition software said he had been trespassed before. He hadn't. I think there was height differences and eye colour difference. The police still arrested him, booked him. I think the prosecutors took it to trial.

[pj_mukh]

I'm sorry but this is a piss-poor excuse. When I Claude code broken features, I'm responsible 100%.

Why are cops not treated the same way? OP is right, AI is totally irrelevant in this story.

If the point is "cops can't be trusted". Why do they have GUNS?! AI is the least of your problems.

I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.

[jacquesm]

> I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.

We're only getting warmed up. There are programmers on HN that will take the output of their favorite AI, paste it and run it. And we're supposed to be the ones that know better.

What do you think an ordinary person is going to do in the presence of something that they can not relate to anything else except for an oracle, assuming they know the term? You put anything in there and out pops this extremely polished looking document, something that looks better than whatever you would put together yourself with a bunch of information on it that contains all kinds of juicy language geared up to make you believe the payload. And it does that in a split second. It's absolutely magical to those in the know, let alone to those that are not.

They're going to fall for it, without a second thought.

And they're going to draw consequences from it that you thought could use a little skepticism. Too late now.

[heavyset_go]

When you foster a culture of impunity and passing the buck, don't be surprised when they pass the buck to the inscrutable black box they bought.

You might even argue that's the purpose of the inscrutable black box.

[TheScaryOne]

AI is the new "it's policy."

[dml2135]

The “I” in “AI” stands for “intelligence”. Cops are using AI facial recognition because it is being sold to them as being smarter and better than what they are currently capable of. Why are we then surprised that they aren’t second-guessing the technology?

[wongarsu]

AI facial recognition is smarter than what they are capable of. That's not the issue. It is much faster than a human, and state-of-the-art models make fewer errors than a human (though the types of errors are not the same).

The issue is that facial recognition is just not very reliable. Not for humans and not for machines. If you look at millions of people, some of them just look incredibly similar. Yet police apparently thought that was all the evidence they will ever need. A case so watertight there's no point in even talking to the suspect

[wartywhoa23]

So the sane solution here is just leaving unreliable stuff to humans and reliable to machines. Especially so when human wellbeing and freedom are at the stake.

To define the line between the two, calculate the percentage of cases when mainstream CPUs return anything but integer 4 after addition of integer 2 and integer 2, and use that as the threshold to define "reliable".

[re-thc]

> The “I” in “AI” stands for “intelligence”

By that logic the “I” in Siri is 2x more intelligent.

[lotsofpulp]

Because they are supposed to possess minimum levels of intelligence found in homo sapiens, which includes not believing anything a salesperson says.

Also, their whole job is dealing with people who constantly lie to them.

[pixl97]

There are two things occurring here.

Police get raises and recognition for closing cases. In general they don't care if you're guilty or not, that's someone else's problem. Same with the detective, same with the DA. The more cases they close they 'tougher they are on crime'.

The next thing occurring is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no

[mapt]

If you have a broken system whose injustice is checked only by the limitations of the human elements, and you start replacing those human elements and powerscaling them, you have an unlimited downside.

[heavyset_go]

Similarly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_bias

[mschild]

Some police departments seem to actively reject candidates that have higher scores on IQ tests. Not that I think IQ test scores and actual intelligence are related but it clearly shows their intended target candidate group.

https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...

[tptacek]

This came up a few weeks ago. I don't think it's true. This lawsuit from 26 years ago is the only example anybody has come up with. Among the problems with this claim:

* Nobody can find a police department that administers any kind of general cognitive test.

* There are large states with statewide written police aptitude tests that are imperfect but correlated to general cognitive ability, and maximizing scores on that test is the universal correct strategy.

* It's a luridly stupid policy and most municipalities aren't luridly stupid.

I think this happened like, once or twice, in one or two of the 20,000 police departments across the United States, many of which are like one goober and his sidekick (no offense to them; just, you live in gooberville, you're a goober), and now it's an Internet meme that police departments specifically hire for midwittery. Nah.

[tharkun__]

You're over-selling the minimum level of intelligence in homo sapiens.

What you're stating is your wishful thinking. Don't get me wrong. I'd also like what you say to be true. It very much is not. Quite the opposite, which is why salespeople "work".

The amount of AI bullshit Senior+ level developers just paste to me as truth is astonishing.

[caconym_]

As soon as we start to see a pattern of shitty vibe-coded software actually harming people via defects etc. (see: therac-25), I would hope that the conversation is about structural change to mitigate risk in aggregate rather than just punitive consequences for the individual programmers who are "responsible". The latter would be a fantastically stupid response and would do little or nothing to reduce future harm.

[pj_mukh]

all accountability need not be punitive, we can certainly talk about systemic guardrails. What I find disbelief in, is someone saying the Chief of Police saying "We are not going to talk about that today?" is not the biggest scandal, but the AI is.

[toraway]

  "Among his accomplishments has been establishing the department’s Real Time Crime Center that leverages technology and data to support officers in responding more effectively to incidents," the city's release said. "Zibolski also prioritized officer wellness initiatives to strengthen mental health resources and resilience within the department. He reinstituted the Traffic Safety Team to focus on roadway safety and proactive enforcement, and ... played an active role in statewide discussions on various issues affecting law enforcement."

From the same article... He spearheaded a push to "leverage technology and data to support officers in responding more effectively to incidents", then that same technology mistakingly ruins a woman's life by passing along a hit to an officer who compared with her FB photos and said "sure, seems right".

The technology seems highly relevant here. Plus, as we've seen in the software world, when a mandate comes from the top to use the shiny new magic AI tools as much as possible, the officer may have felt pressured to make arrests using the new system they paid a bunch of money for instead of second guessing whatever it spits out.

[caconym_]

> someone saying the Chief of Police saying "We are not going to talk about that today?" is not the biggest scandal, but the AI is.

Who is this "someone"? OP's article and the discussion here are absolutely not neglecting the human factors and general institutional failure that made this possible. But it's also true that without these "AI" tools, it would never have happened.

[pj_mukh]

Yea but this feels like when a Waymo ran over a cat, and a Human driver ran over a toddler and both got the same level of coverage in the media (actually the cat got more follow-up coverage). And I'm supposed to believe both issues are equally important.

No. That's gaslighting, and totally misplaced political activation.

[malwrar]

You are right IMO to question why North Dakota police were able to obtain this Tennessean woman in the first place, you’d think something like that should require far more sufficient evidence than facial recognition.

But, then what good is facial recognition for? Would it have been okay for this woman’s life to have been merely invaded because she matched a facial recognition system? Maybe they can just secretly watch you so you’re not consciously aware of being investigated? Should that be our new standard, if a computer thinks you look like a suspect you can be harassed by police in a state you’ve never even been in?

I just don’t see a legitimate way for AI to empower officers here without risking these new harms. That’s why I lean towards blaming the AI tech, rather than historically intractable problems like the reality of law enforcement.

[mlinsey]

Having a facial recognition match make you a suspect and cause the police to ask you some questions doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me. Investigations can certainly begin with weak forms of evidence (like an anonymous tip), you just require a higher standard of evidence for a search warrant, surveillance, or an arrest. A facial recognition match shouldn't be probable cause for an arrest warrant, but it still might be a useful starting point for a detective looking for actual evidence.

[crooked-v]

It is absolutely not reasonable to use low-quality photos to decide someone halfway across the country with no history of even leaving their local area is 'a suspect'.

[kitd]

You wouldn't know they had no history of leaving their local area unless you interviewed them.

[Brian_K_White]

I feel like I'm going crazy that anyone tries to suggest the AI and the producers and promulgators and apologists of AI played no part and bear none of the responsibility in this narrative.

[JuniperMesos]

Because the responsibility lies on the part of the criminal justice system who used the flimsy AI facial recognition evidence to arrest and hold her for months. If AI didn't exist, and this same incident happened because a human looked at a photograph of the woman and said "I think this might be the same person who committed the crime in the video", it would be insane to blame the people who invented photographs or video recording for her arrest.

[Anamon]

The problem is in how these tools are sold to them. Not everybody can be an expert in every topic. Like in every other application area, these AI systems are promoted as being able to do about a thousand times more, and a million times more reliably, than they actually are. Of course the departments can be expected to do some due diligence and instruct their officers, but the lies by AI system suppliers is where a large part of the blame belongs. Manufacturers of cameras or CCTV systems never told the police department that the system would do their job for them.

[jfengel]

You are exactly correct. Cops cannot be trusted. We spent a lot of time pointing that out in 2020. AI is the least of our problems with policing.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are certain it won't happen to them, and it has been practically impossible to establish any kind of accountability. It has only gotten worse since 2020.

[akimbostrawman]

Are we just gonna pretend the wide implementation of bodycams hasn't shown that the overwhelming majority of times the cops weren't in the wrong to a point that the same people that demanded them want them gone now?

[FireBeyond]

Citation needed. Who are these people who wanted improved police oversight who are supposedly now fighting for the removal of bodycams?

[antod]

But it's not totally irrelevant in this story.

Cops are already susceptible to confirmation bias, and for "efficiencies" they are delegating part of their job to apparently magical tools that will only increase their confirmation bias. And because it is for efficiency you can bet they won't be given extra time to validate the results.

What or who is at fault isn't either/or, it's a bunch of compounding factors.

[smcl]

You’re on the right track here but I don’t think it should be hand-waved away as “the least of your problems” - it’s yet another weapon that police in the USA can use against the population with impunity. They’re going to have to reckon with all of this in the coming years - cops having guns and armored cars, “qualified immunity”, the “stop resisting” workaround for brutality and now this AI

[pessimizer]

> Why are cops not treated the same way? OP is right, AI is totally irrelevant in this story.

It's absolutely absurd. The argument that AI is the problem is literally the people arguing against AI shedding responsibility to the machines. The people arguing that AI is the problem are essentially (philosophically) the same people who will say it was the AIs fault.

The thing that it most reminds me of is people trying to stop the deaths and injuries that come as a result of "swatting" by being really angry at people who "swat" and proposing the harshest punishment for it that they can come up with (or outdoes anyone else in the thread.)

The problem with swatting is that police were showing up to the houses of harmless people based on anonymous phone tips and murdering them. You guarantee swatting will work indefinitely when you indemnify the cops.

You don't need AI for injustice in the US justice system. There is literally no part of the US justice system that makes sense at all, and even in the best case scenario when the guilty are caught, tried, and punished, it is tremendously wasteful, cruel, and ass-backwards. Juries are basically the AI of the US justice system, allowing the prosecutorial and enforcement apparatus to be infinitely cruel, illogical, self-serving and incompetent. 12xFull AGI. AI couldn't do any worse.

> I feel like I'm going crazy with this narrative.

You're not alone.

[stego-tech]

You’re going crazy because up until this exact moment you’ve never had to confront the reality that these tools, placed into the hands of the common man, are viewed as authoritative and lack any accountability or consequence for misuse.

For anyone who has been victimized by law enforcement or governments before, we’ve been warning about this shit for decades. About the lack of consequence for police brutality. The lack of consequence for LPR abuse. The lack of consequence for facial recognition failures and AI mismatches.

You need to understand that by using these systems correctly and holding yourself accountable, you are in the minority. Most people do not think that critically, and are all too happy to finger the computer when things go badly.

And until you accept that, and work to actually hold folks accountable instead of deflecting blame away from the tool, then this won’t actually change.

[Nimitz14]

Your answer presumes we cannot hold people accountable. I think that is incorrect.

[throwaway17_17]

Do you mean hypothetically could society hold law enforcement personnel accountable for mistakes, bad judgement, flagrant criminal conduct, horrendous abuse of any and everyone? Certainly, a large scale and comprehensive restructuring of America’s law enforcement and prosecutorial system is legally possible.

However, I hold to the opinion that if you are discussing actual reality, based on decades (if not the entire period post civil war, for near certainty) of historical examples and the current “majority” position of the US electorate: there is a nearly unqualified NO. We cannot, or will not, hold law enforcement accountable for even intentional, planned, and malicious conduct in a vast majority of cases. There is practically no accountability at all, and that’s just for thoroughly proven intentional conduct. Bad judgement, alleged mistakes, etc are even less able to result in any action.

The reality of the legislation and precedent ensure it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

[rapnie]

The AI is the authority having so much knowledge, that we hear a reassuring "Please continue" [0].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

[pear01]

It's called qualified immunity. Many support its repeal. I hope you join them, and convey the same to your local representatives and candidates. Until it is reformed few if any officers or administrators of criminal justice in the United States will ever feel any type of accountability.

Short of video evidence of blatant gun to the back of the head style homicide qualified immunity means most law enforcement officials are never held accountable for their miscarriages of justice. Criminal charges against officers are exceedingly rare. She should be able to sue this detective directly. Of course she can sue the government too, and should. But without any personal consequences for the people carrying out these acts, taxpayers will continue to bail out these practices without ever noticing. Your own government should not be a shield for a police officer who has violated you or your neighbors.

[kelnos]

> Many support its repeal.

There's nothing to repeal. Qualified immunity is a doctrine that the judicial branch made up out of thin air, with no legislative backing.

But agreed, we need legislatures to write laws that expressly hold police accountable, and declare that they are not shielded from liability when things go wrong due to their own failures and negligence.

[throwaway17_17]

Not that it changes your point, but, um actually:

While the origins of qualified immunity are judicial, some State loved the idea so much the went and made it statutory too. Louisiana’s 2024 bill explicitly removes negligence as an exception (which is a valid method to circumvent qualified immunity based on jurisprudence at the federal and most state levels). Louisiana requires intentional violations or criminal actions to even be able to bring a claim.

[jfengel]

> Short of video evidence of blatant gun to the back of the head style homicide qualified immunity means most law enforcement officials are never held accountable for their miscarriages of justice.

And frequently not even then.

[ux266478]

You can hold someone responsible only after they've actually fucked up. And with the way things move in the criminal justice system, that can take months to discover. Holding them responsible doesn't really fix anything, it's purely reactive.

[lenkite]

Dude, not sure which team are you working in, but across many-many domains - corporate, business and political, people are already delegating full decision making and responsibility to AI. Unless national governments and standards institutions create and enforce ironclad AI governance laws, situations resembling what this poor granny went through are going to occur again, again and again.

[rectang]

There’s money to be made selling AI plausible deniability machines that allow end users to enact unethical policies while evading accountability, but only if all moral responsibility ostensibly falls on the end user and none on the dealer.

[wat10000]

When are cops ever treated the same way as the rest of us?

[deepsun]

Well in most cases I would prefer to have a cop's word to outweigh a word of an average joe.

[bloomingeek]

You should tell that to Angela Lipps, I'm sure she told every cop she came in contact with she had never been to Fargo. Cops have a responsibility to do their job, part of that job is listening and relying on proof. ALL those cops were either too lazy or were afraid of their superiors. This is unacceptable for the amount of power and information they have access to. We should either de-fund the police system or reform the hell out of it. BTW, where was her state representative during this fiasco?!?

[throwaway17_17]

The belief by a juror that law enforcement personnel, especially phrased as a belief that applies to law enforcement personnel as a generic group, is a well established basis for a challenge for cause leading to exclusion of that person from being a juror. The US jury system is build explicitly on excluding these types of belief in juries in order to ensure fairness, impartiality, and individual and case/witness specificity of “triers-of-fact”.

I could understand someone who disagrees with it, but your position would be antithetical to current and historical thought on what defines a fair jury.

[PopAlongKid]

>The belief by a juror that law enforcement personnel,

>excluding these types of belief

You have not stated what belief you are talking about.

[amanaplanacanal]

Do you think police are inherently more honest than everybody else? Why would you think that?

[wat10000]

Why should having that particular job give you that privilege? All should be equal before the law.

[kelnos]

I mean, this is the USA we're talking about. Cops are given huge authority over everyone else, with poor accountability. AI just lets them pretend to be even less accountable. And by "pretend" I of course mean "get away with it".

[materialpoint]

See, AI was used to accelerate arrest and jailing, but not to follow through. It was not used to ensure her well being. Clearly this demonstrates that AI contributes to treating humans inhumanely, and demonstrably AI is not used to improve anyones quality of life. Stop making excuses for "AI not at fault here".

[andrepd]

It's not even just incompetence, but malice. "AI says so" is going to be the perfect catch-all excuse for literally everything anyone might want to do that they shouldn't. You know how techbros love to excuse every horrifying outcome of their torment nexi with "don't blame me, the algorithm did it"? It's going to be like that, but now everyone can do it.

[dqv]

It's also why people start parroting the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does". Look at where we are right now: a precipice before this becomes widely used in all forms of policing. We still have a chance to police the police's use of the AI.

The purpose of using AI to identify suspects in criminal cases is to ease the burden of manual searching for a suspect (or insert whatever the purpose of statement you want). Ok, but we're getting false positives that are damaging people's lives already in the early stages. And I don't want to hear "trust me bro, it will get more accurate" as an excuse to not regulate it.

At a minimum, we should enshrine the right to appeal AI and have limits on how it can be used for probable cause.

This isn't even the only recent case of this happening. There was another case of mistaken identity due to AI. [0] Sure 4 hours isn't the same as 5 months, but still this guy wanted to show multiple forms of ID to prove who he was! The bodycam footage was posted a few months back but never got traction here.

Like if the police officer can't read numbers, they can't do breathalyzer tests on people. If the AI can't be used responsibly, then it can't be used at all.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPUBXN2Fd_E

[mapt]

If you're skeptical, watch this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPUBXN2Fd_E

[foxglacier]

So what? There were false arrests and convictions made by misuse of line-ups, DNA, eye-witnesses, photos, bloodstains, fingerprints, etc. since forever. You must also blame all those other technologies, so what do you think the police should use to find suspects? In your view, the more help police have, the worse a job they'll do. Is that actually the trend?

[catlikesshrimp]

With all other proof you mentioned, there was always a human putting his signature.

Now that they can blame "AI" no specific officer(s) will take the blame, ever. If no one is responsible there will be many more false positives.

And false positives destroy lives

[dragonwriter]

> With all other proof you mentioned, there was always a human putting his signature.

There was a human doing that in this case; AI doesn’t inititiate charges. “In his charging document, the detective wrote that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle and color.”

[JuniperMesos]

The article could have - but didn't - mention this specific Fargo police detective's name.

[dragonwriter]

The article not mentioning the name does not change that the detective did sign the police charging documents.

(Nor does the omission in the article of other names and procedural details change the fact that for there to be actual criminal charges, an arrest warrant, extradition, and incarceration, a number of other people had to sign their names to official acts, including, among others, at least one public prosecutor, and more than one judge.)

[worik]

So what???

This woman lost most of her material possessions, was terrorised by "goons"... The police do this stuff regularly, as black people, immigrants, "white trash" etcetera know well. Another opportunity, presented BY AI models for more routine police oppression

As the wise singer said: "Fuck the police!"

[foxglacier]

Exactly, it's the police's fault, as well as the wider system they operate in that enables that kind of abuse, and they do it anyway even with out AI.

[dragonwriter]

AI is, in this case, a tool enabling it, because trawling large databases using AI allows finding people with a degree of similarity to a suspect that would reasonably constitute probable cause int he context of what was until fairly recently the norm for police work because that work relies on proximity and connections to the crime. The understanding of probable cause and what is necessary for it , given the actual investigative process in the case, including the use of large databases unconnected with the events and locality of the crime needs to adapt.

[scarecrowbob]

You're right that they often do a lot of harm.

The point that you're missing is that, in a system where such abuses are possible, many of us really don't want one more tool in their box for them to fuck us with.

Like, they already prove themselves incompetent- giving the power to track anyone in the US via a distributed ALPR system just makes them more dangerous. Giving them all these "AI" based tools does the same.

[foxglacier]

What do you think the appropriate set of tools for the police is? All the same but without AI face recognition or ALPR? Or also without DNA? fingerprints? guns? Access to government held data like tax filings? Access to other police departments' data?

[caconym_]

This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI and in particular cops with facial recognition tools, dragnet LPR surveillance tools, and all this other new technology that essentially picks somebody's name out of a hat to have their life temporarily (or [semi-]permanently) ruined by shithead cops who won't ever face any real accountability.

This keeps happening, and the reason it keeps happening is that shithead cops have these tools and are using them. Until we can find a reliable way to prevent this from happening, which may or may not be possible, cops who may or may not be shitheads should not have access to these tools.

[cortesoft]

Yes! This is about why mass surveillance and dragnets and the like are horrible. These all suffer from people not being able to understand the base rate fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy)

Even if AI facial recognition gets really really good, and is 99.999% accurate, if you use it in this way you are going to arrest more innocent people than guilty people.

If you find a suspect, who has a lot of evidence pointing to them being the criminal and you run a test that is 99.999% accurate and it tells you they are guilty, they are probably guilty.

But if you take that same test and run it against the entire population of the country, it is going to find 3500 people that match with "99.999% certainty" That gives you a 0.02% of the person being guilty.

People don't think like this, though, so they think the person must be guilty.

[hinkley]

It’s also cops Making the Numbers Go Up by marking down a case file as having progressed because someone is in custody. Which isn’t about justice.

[mothballed]

They don't seem to give a single iota of a fuck about that when a private regular person has their money stolen or their car totaled by hit and run driver. Finding some innocent person to arrest would indicate they are at least pretending to give a fuck, yet they seem to only be bothered to even keep up appearances when it is the bank being robbed.

[chocoboaus3]

mate Capitalism 101

[bloomingeek]

Sorry, I disagree. This is an example of the corruption inside the American legal system. The cops are at the level of us regulars, and their judgement and actions seem to have no supervision or accountability.

[tgv]

> cops [...] should not have access to these tools

But what else can (identification via) face recognition be (safely) used for? Absolutely nothing. It's tech that's just made for surveillance.

[guelo]

It's not just the shithead cops, it's the voters. All the "Blue Lives Matter", "thin blue line", "back the blue" propaganda works towards giving police infinite powers with zero accountability. This is what voters want and they've said so loudly over and over again.

[throwaway314155]

There’s nothing wrong with your comment per se, but it’s almost as if you didn’t even read the comment you’re responding to.

[caconym_]

Let me help you out with this comprehension issue. The point of my comment is that I disagree with the apparent premise of the comment I replied to, which is that "AI" is some generic investigative tool that we can neatly snip out of the picture to blame this incident on human factors at the individual level ("the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility"). Said comment also implies that people are fixating on the AI aspect of this issue while ignoring the human factors, which IMO is a strawman. To me, the existence of AI in its current incarnations and the ways in which law enforcement will inevitably abuse it are, together, inseparably, the problem. AI (in the most general sense) opens up entire new dimensions for potential abuse.

As a concrete example:

> And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.

Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all. So saying that it has "nothing to do with AI" is totally ridiculous.

[fc417fc802]

> Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all.

How do you arrive at that conclusion? Because it happened, and it wasn't an AI overseeing (the lack of) due process. The police identifying suspects is part of their job. So are arrest warrants and all the rest of it. I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here. All I see is a gaping systemic issue that could have happened regardless of AI if the wrong person got the wrong idea or had a personal vendetta.

Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list. We blame the systemic practices and legal apparatus that permitted it all to happen in the first place.

You might as well blame the SUV manufacturer because without vehicles the police wouldn't hav been able to drive over to make the arrest, right?

[caconym_]

> How do you arrive at that conclusion?

Because it's beyond obvious? How would this woman have ended up in jail if she hadn't been misidentified by the facial recognition software in use by the Fargo police? She lives 3 states over; would be a hell of a coincidence if some other avenue of investigation led them to her.

> I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here.

You honestly don't see what facial recognition software had to do with a woman being misidentified by facial recognition software?

> Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list.

I actually am completely willing to blame any entity that supplies ICE with the names of people it can reasonably assume will be targeted for "enforcement action" due to said entity representing said names as being legitimate targets for said enforcement action, without taking reasonable care to ensure said representation is correct in each and every case.

What you don't seem to understand is that these abuses of law enforcement authority are predicated on at least an appearance of legitimacy, which can be provided by (e.g.) an app with (presumably) a very official looking logo that agents can point at somebody to get a 'CITIZEN' or 'NOT CITIZEN' classification. It is upon this kind of basis that they perform illegal arrests. All parties—the app vendor and ICE, as well as the people who are meant to be overseeing ICE and providing accountability—are complicit enablers in these crimes. To absolve the vendors who provide the software knowing full well what it will be used for, what its limitations are, and how unlikely it is that ICE personnel will understand those limitations and work around them to keep everything legal, is totally absurd.

[fc417fc802]

It isn't obvious, no. If I drop a hammer on my foot and break my toe I can't then blame the hardware store or the manufacturer. If the store didn't carry hammers I wouldn't have been able to purchase it, I think to myself. Then I couldn't possibly have dropped it on my foot, thus my toe wouldn't be broken right now. It's a specious line of reasoning.

It doesn't matter in the slightest by what means she was selected to "win" this particular lottery. The tool rolling the dice isn't to blame. Tools (and people!) will occasionally return spurious results. Any system needs to be set up to deal with that.

So no, I honestly don't see what facial recognition software has to do with gross negligence and process failure on the part of multiple government agencies.

> without taking reasonable care to ensure said representation is correct in each and every case.

Only if that was part of the contract. Was the product delivered according to specification or not?

What if ICE used FOSS tools to put together the list themselves? Are the tools still to blame? That would obviously be absurd.

The only way the provider (never the tool) could be at fault would be something such as willful negligence or knowingly and intentionally attempting to manipulate the user's actions to some end.

What you don't seem to understand is that human negligence can't be foisted off on tools. Of course an abuser will try to play his actions off as legitimate. That isn't the fault of the tool, it's the fault of the abuser. It isn't up to an app to determine the legitimacy of LEO agent actions. Neither is it the responsibility of an arbitrary, fungible government contractor to oversee ICE.

I think you're confusing the morality of participating in a broader ecosystem with moral culpability for the process failure associated with a specific event. You can advance a reasonable argument that AI companies that choose to do business with ICE are making an at least moderately immoral decision. However that doesn't place them at fault for the specific process failures of any particular event that happens.

[throwaway314155]

Like I said, there wasn’t anything wrong with your comment. It just didn’t seem to directly address the parent comment. This does, thanks.

[Retric]

Seems like a direct response to me.

>> How is this the fault of AI?

> This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI

You can’t separate the thing from how it will be used. It’s like arguing that cars on their own aren’t particularly dangerous, but the point of buying a car is to use it thus risking the general public.

[fc417fc802]

But you can in fact argue exactly that. If (arbitrary example) pedestrians are being killed due to poor road engineering practices it isn't reasonable to point at cars and say "see those are the root problem" when in fact it's due to a willful lack of sidewalks or marked crossings or whatever. Being adjacent to something bad doesn't equate to being the root cause.

[Retric]

History shows the timeline of dependence here. Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. So clearly it’s cars that are necessitating sidewalks, etc.

Same deal here, if something “becomes a problem” because of the introduction of AI, it’s AI that is the root case of the resulting issues. Many people are tempted to argue that flawed humans can’t implement the perfect system that is Anarchy, Communism, Recycling programs, or whatever but treating systems as needing to operate on the real world is productive where complaining about humans isn’t.

[fc417fc802]

Well I (thought it was obvious that) I was referring to roads constructed relatively recently. If cars necessitate sidewalks and the city chooses to cut costs by not putting those in that isn't the fault of automobile designers or manufacturers or dealers or private owners or whoever.

To your example, technology changes and that necessitates infrastructure changing. That doesn't mean that fault for mishaps in the meantime can be attributed to the new technology. A user operating the new technology in an obviously unsafe manner is solely at fault for his own negligence.

[tatersolid]

> Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths.

Death by adverse horse encounter was very common before the 1920s. Not sure how many of those deaths can be blamed on poor quality road engineering. But putting a bunch of humans, carts, and excitable half-ton animals in the same crowded streets seems like poor engineering practice.

[antonymoose]

Reminds me of a case that just popped up in my neck of the woods.

Man gets pulled over on an expired plate. They search based on this fact, find a pill bottle (for Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and magically find he’s trafficking cocaine and fentanyl.

Months later a lab test exonerates the poor guy.

https://www.wyff4.com/article/deputies-falsely-identify-ibs-...

[bloomingeek]

I've always maintained one of the worst things that can happen to you is sitting in court before a jury of your peers, because most can't comprehend the meaning of the law outside of their feelings. NOW the worst thing is having yourself in the hands of cops who just don't give a damn or became a cop for the use of power.

[JuniperMesos]

This one seems pretty reasonable - according to the article, the cops pulled him over for swerving lanes (driving unsafely on public roads in a reasonable thing to want to police), and then discovered that he was driving on a suspended license, which he admitted to (it's reasonable to have a system for suspending peoples' drivers licenses that is enforced by the police). The police find the pill bottle and don't believe him when he tells them it's a legitimate drug, then "conduct[..] multiple field drug tests, which produced a positive result for fentanyl. Getchius was taken into custody and transported to the Greenwood County Detention Center. Shortly after, another drug test was completed and returned positive results for cocaine."

So it wasn't just the pill bottle, it was multiple other drug tests. I think you could make a reasonable argument that drug use shouldn't constitute a crime in and of itself - although it probably should if you're driving a car, for legitimate traffic safety reasons, I don't find DUI laws objectionable. Or you could make an argument that the criminal justice system shouldn't interfere with peoples' decision to use and sell drugs. I'm sympathetic to this myself, but I think especially in the case of opioids like fentanyl, the situation where government paternalism makes it illegal to sell opioids probably discourages enough destructive use of these drugs by unwise or already-addicted people that it's still net-positive in terms of human welfare. I suspect a society where it was simply legal to use and sell opioids would have a lot more human suffering in it than our own (possibly because in the absence of laws banning open opioid dealing, people who are close to severe opioid addicts might simply commit vigilante murders of suspected opioid dealers, and be left unconvicted by sympathetic juries). And once you hold the position that it's legitimate for the government to legally restrict the sale and use of these drugs, then you necessarily have to have something like police and something like a criminal justice system that investigates whether a person might be actually using and selling opioids and then lying about it.

The fact that the guy was in fact once addicted to some drug and "was working at rehab and addiction centers in Florida at the time of his arrest." is additional evidence that he might have returned to drug use, and there's no way to make cops who investigate opioid-related crimes not think this.

[mwigdahl]

If a field drug test can confuse an irritable bowel syndrome drug for fentanyl or cocaine, it is not reliable enough to be used for law enforcement purposes. The same applies to facial recognition tech. We need real information on the false positive vs false negative rates for tech that purports to establish identity or criminality.

[1123581321]

The test didn't confuse the drugs. He tested positive for fentanyl and cocaine. They accused him of trafficking drugs in addition to that because of the IBS pill bottle.

It's an unfortunate story because it sounds like he was having relapse trouble, and the cops were predisposed to do the worst to him that they could (mis)justify, when he needed to cool off and then get back to the professionals helping him with recovery.

[obviouslynotme]

It's not. This is just an acceleration in the unraveling of society facilitated by AI. As someone whose childhood included so many "robots will kill humans" books and movies, I am flabbergasted that the AI apocalypse will be dumb humans overtrusting faulty AI in important matters until everything falls apart.

Most humans cannot distinguish AI from actual intelligence. When you combine that with bureaucrats innate tendency to say, "Computer said so," you end up with bizarre situations like this. If a person had made this facial match, another human would have relentlessly jeered him. Since a computer running AI did it, no one even cared to think about it.

Computers are wildly dangerous, not because of anything innate but because of how humans act around them.

[throwaway173738]

> It's not. This is just an acceleration in the unraveling of society facilitated by AI. As someone whose childhood included so many "robots will kill humans" books and movies, I am flabbergasted that the AI apocalypse will be dumb humans overtrusting faulty AI in important matters until everything falls apart.

This is literally the plot of most of those books and the way they differ is in how everything falls apart. In some of them the AI supplants us entirely and kills us all. In others it gets taught to kill us all. In others it gets really good at giving us what we ask for until everything falls apart. But it’s taken as a given that unless we change something innate in our culture AI will be our downfall.

[fc417fc802]

> If a person had made this facial match, another human would have relentlessly jeered him.

The glaringly obvious problem here is that our justice system should not be constructed in such a way so as to be reliant on someone's coworker shaming him. That is not a sensible check against a systemic failure. We're supposed to have due process. If someone skips or otherwise subverts due process the justifications don't matter. The root issue is that due process was skipped. Why was that even possible to begin with?

[themafia]

> How is this the fault of AI?

It could be the fault of the company that's selling this service. They often make wildly inaccurate claims about the utility and accuracy of their systems. [0]

> There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people.

Yes we do. [1]

> and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.

Her guilt was assessed. That's why she had no bail. It assessed it incorrectly, but the error is more complicated than your reaction implies.

[0]: https://thisisreno.com/2026/03/lawsuit-reno-police-ai-polici...

[1]: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...

[throwaway17_17]

To clarify one point, her not having a bail is a function of the way interstate ‘fugitive’ warrants are designed. The Court in Tennessee had no ability to set bail, and until she entered the physical custody of North Dakota she can not have bail set.

Also, her guilt was not assessed in any common meaning of the term. The requirement for holding a person in custody, with or without bail, is probable cause. The only thing assessed was did law enforcement present a statement to a Judge that was possible to be believed in the light most favorable to the prosecution.

[danso]

> How is this the fault of AI?

AI is being used by bureaucrats and enforcers to justify lazy, harmful conclusions. You don't live in the real world if you think "just punish the bureaucrats, don't make it about AI" is going to remotely rectify this toxic feedback loop and ecosystem.

[fc417fc802]

No, we definitely should punish bureaucrats and enforcers who act negligently. If someone in a position of authority flagrantly fails to do his job and it directly harms someone he should be held accountable. That would provide a strong incentive for future actors to take their responsibilities seriously.

If an engineer signs off on an obviously faulty building plan and people die as a result we hold him accountable. This is no different.

[rolandog]

It is the fault of the coders, the salespeople who over-promised the capabilities of the system, the lawmakers who have not regulated or demanded a minimum percentage of accuracy from those products, the AI' company's onboarding trainers, the cops that were trained to use the software, the jailers, and maybe other related positions that should've taken a better interest in making a better system, not a more cruel one

[stego-tech]

It's the fault of the tool because our society treats the tools as superior judgements than humans and to be trusted completely as a means of deflecting accountability - something any and every minority group has been warning about for fucking decades.

The reason everyone rushes to defend the tool's use is because holding humans accountable would mean throwing these tools out entirely in most cases, due to internal human biases and a decline in basic critical and cognitive thinking skills. The marketing has been the same since the 80s: the tool is superior (until it isn't), the tool shall be trusted completely (until it fails), the tool cannot make mistakes (until it does).

If folks actually listened to the victims of this shit, companies like Flock and Palantir would be gutted and their founders barred from any sort of office of responsibility, at minimum. The fact so many deflect blame from the tool like the marketing manual demands shows they don't actually give a shit about the humans wrapped up in the harms, or the misuse and misappropriation of these tools by persons wholly unaccountable under the law, but only about defending a shiny thing they personally like.

[pixl97]

>rushes to defend the tool's use is because holding humans accountable would mean throwing these tools out entirely in most cases, due to internal human biases and a decline in basic critical and cognitive thinking skill

The magical past where people had critical thinking skills never existed. We put a lot of trust in tools is because people are unfucking reliable. Hence why in most cases actual physical evidence does a far better job than witness testimony.

This said, people are lazy. It is one of our greatest and worst traits. When we are allowed to be lazy, especially with tools bad things happen.

[rightbyte]

> How is this the fault of AI?

The false positive rate combined with scanning millions of pictures might make the chance of arresting the wrong person really high.

[akimbostrawman]

The wrong detection is the AI's fault. Anything after and based off that is the fault of humans.

[rectang]

Before the misuse, there is opportunity to predict that misuse is certain to occur.

[Nevermark]

If many people's writing skills are suffering, due to highly convenient AI support, just imagine how fast mediocre crime investigation skills are going to devolve.

It is going to get bad in every skilled area of human managed bureaucracy.

The number of legal filings found to include AI confabulations is just the obvious surface.

[type0]

> Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman

One big reason for AI adoption everywhere is that you can use it as a scapegoat

[unethical_ban]

Someone from the government should be in jail for this kind of oversight.

[throwaway173738]

I think the taxpayers owe this lady at least a couple million if not more for the inconvenience they chose to put her through.

[throwaway17_17]

I agree, but our system doesn’t value things that way. Texas, which is one of the highest paying States for cases where intentional, fraudulent, or grossly negligent actions result in wrongful incarceration pay $80,000 dollars per year a person is locked up. But the caveat is that time only starts counting after you are sentenced, so wouldn’t even apply in TFA’s case.

[dghlsakjg]

That's statutory damages on a wrongful conviction.

This is an entirely different situation, and the amount would not be statutory.

[subscribed]

That shouldn't be taxpayers. That should come from the malpractice insurance, similarly how doctors pay.

After a while, when premiums shoot up, they'd start to behave

[selbyk]

Who pays the insurance premiums?

[chocoboaus3]

its the only way this stops happening.

[lokar]

Automation has a strong tendency to degrade diligence.

I see this all the time in operational / production settings. Having a loop with automation reviewed and approved by a human degrades very fast. I only approve automation that has a quick path to unsupervised operation.

[jjav]

> A live human detective confirmed it.

I doubt it, due to human nature. Perhaps the process says the human must consciously validate, but a lot of humans in many cases will just rubberstamp what the AI said. That's the risk.

[culi]

Study after study has shown a very strong and consistent bias of humans to trust "automated systems" in face of any ambiguity

[tgv]

> How is this the fault of AI?

I'll reply to the top of the discussion too: it's because it was purely made for this purpose. There's no use for it outside surveillance. And it's not even good enough. It's only purpose is checking boxes and transferring money. Miscarriage of justice is an unfortunate, but calculated side effect.

[dyauspitr]

Because if you let this slide the human, such as he is, will be removed from the loop and these mistakes will become acceptable once departments get used to how cheap the AI is compared to a human. There will be no going back and mistakes like this will just become accepted collateral damage.

[dragonwriter]

> How is this the fault of AI

It isn't, the article doesn't claim (or even imply) that it is "the fault" of AI, only that AI was part of the chain of events, and nothing is the fault of AI until AI is sufficiently advanced to constitute a moral actor. “At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, one of which is the error of blaming it on the computer” remains true.

OTOH, it is potentially the fault of the reliance human actors put on an AI determination.

[RobRivera]

I think it's more nuanced; it is one error in a Tragedy of Errors.

[throwaway17_17]

This was not a series of errors, this is (as a statistical inference) the system working as designed. This is not uncommon, it is not unplanned. The extradition of suspects from State to State is designed legislatively to function this way.

I also think there is more nuance to this situation than AI bad // Human Bad :: choose one. But while a tragedy, the ‘correct’ functioning of a system that produces tragedy doesn’t make that function and error.

[plorg]

I think the biggest problem is that the popular narratives about AI enable this like of accountability sink.

[hdgvhicv]

Before AI it was outsourcing. “Not my fault the system is down and we’re losing 1m an hour, AWS is having a bad day”

[EchoReflection]

100% 100% 100% humanity is so obsessed with ai that we're losing...our humanity. "blame the mindless, soulless robots! how could we have possibly known that they need to be supervised?! aren't they basically just humans that don't need to rest or eat?"

[petre]

> How is this the fault of AI?

Humans being human. Getting lazy, being incompetent, getting incompetent with AI use or simply being biased. The wrongfully arrested person doesn't even resamble the perpetrator.

Maybe if they were held accountable forthese actions, they would act responsibly?

[croes]

Where does it say that AI is blamed.

It says she was misidentified using facial recognition.

That’s exactly what happened

[arwhatever]

Devils advocate: what if a facial recognition system with a large enough database can always find an unrelated/innocent person that looks similar enough to convince the human?

[blitzar]

computer said yes

[discordance]

lgtm

[tim-tday]

The legal system has long treated a computer match as infallible. This has led to miscarriage of justice on a grand scale.

[worik]

> How is this the fault of AI?

It is not. It is the fault of the police

AI models are tools. When mistakes are made they are the mistake of the operator of said tool

This AI model was badly misused, this woman should get a metric shit tonne of compensation, but it was the fault of the police.

[vbezhenar]

At this point I think that AI will perform human duties better than human. So probably it's better to let AI autonomously jail people, of course with all the necessary procedures as required by law.

[rectang]

As a work of literature, I applaud your Swiftian “modest proposal”.

[ares623]

I hope you take this as a teaching/learning opportunity