Live data from Hacker News

A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

theregister.com

51–60 of 211 posts

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#52
post #24

Wow there are microphones used to detect gunshots in Chicago? I remember seeing such technology in a relatively obscure cyberpunk comic book when I was a kid, but I never thought this would be legal. Do the microphones record conversations too? Can the government spy on its own citizens? I guess some secret court ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intell... ) allowed it?

Oh boy, wait until you learn it’s not just Chicago where they deploy this crap [1]

[1] https://www.shotspotter.com/cities/

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#53
post #50
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call polygraphs forensics. Most states do not allow them as evidence. Do you have a link for the fingerprinting claim?

(Not who you responded to) https://www.crammlawfirm.com/fingerprint-match-jails-innocen... This isn't the case I originally recalled, and doesn't say how many points were matched, but I remember a 5 point match being used to convict a person who was later proven innocent.

That shows its flawed, not junk.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#55
post #48
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fingerprinting is junk science. Polygraphs are junk science. Tons of things that have been or are admissible as evidence are junk science.

I wouldn't call polygraphs forensics. Most states do not allow them as evidence. Do you have a link for the fingerprinting claim?

Not fingerprinting, but related issue for microscopic hair comparisons:

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#56

The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots: > records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually.…

If manual reclassification is routine then what does that say about the AI?

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#57
post #9

Coming next year: "A man spent a year in jail on child pornography charge that hinged on disputed Apple CSAM evidence".

For that to happen: they'd have to be matched 30 times, the Apple employees would have to mistakenly manually confirm the match 30 times, and the defence would fail to request to see the underlying images that matched the hashes during discovery. It seems... far fetched.

[deleted]

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that to happen: they'd have to be matched 30 times, the Apple employees would have to mistakenly manually confirm the match 30 times, and the defence would fail to request to see the underlying images that matched the hashes during discovery. It seems... far fetched.

For now.

When your slippery slope includes the abolition of pre-trial discovery, it's a very slippery slope indeed.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#59

The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots: > records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually.…

If manual reclassification is routine then what does that say about the AI?

That it doesn't give the answers the customers (police and prosecutors) want.

Which is mostly unrelated to whether or not it's accurate.

Post reply on HN