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Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

grandforksherald.com

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Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.”

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

Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#332
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. N…

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.

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".

Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#334
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. N…

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 bas…

Closed source DNA testing software and hardware is a travesty imo

Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

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

Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

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

Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#337
This has nothing to do with AI.

There are also a few questions that remain unanswered:

- Did she have previous arrests, and did they use booking photos to identify her? I found someone named Angela Lipps who was arrested in 2001, 2003, 2017, and 2019. The 2017 arrest was for a probation violation: https://archive.ph/CpmXu The 2019 arrest was for public intoxication: https://archive.ph/yjFL9

- Another confusing detail is that she was in jail for four months without being extradited. That is quite unusual, unless the local authorities were holding her on unrelated charges.

So this news story seems to have nothing to do with AI. It is also very light on details about the case and what actually happened. And actual criminal case here.

Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#338
post #51

> 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 i…

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.

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

Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#339
This is the part that always gets glossed over in the "AI will solve everything" narratives: these systems don't fail gracefully. They fail with confidence.

The real problem isn't that the AI made a mistake—it's that everyone in the chain deferred to it. The technology became an excuse to stop thinking critically. "The algorithm said so" is the new "I was just following orders."

We need less faith in these tools, not more.

Re: Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition

#340
post #51

> 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 i…

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-...

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.

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