In January 2020, Robert Williams was wrongly arrested — the victim of a faulty artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition system. Even as he fought to clear his name, the system continued operating.
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.
Regardless…
Officers drove to Mr Williams’ house and handcuffed him.
They arrested him in front of his five and two-year-old kids…
Ai with bad training data + lazy cops who didn’t learn how to use the tools they were given = this mess
TLDR:
Regardless…
They arrested him in front of his five and two-year-old kids…
Ai with bad training data + lazy cops who didn’t learn how to use the tools they were given = this mess
Sounds like the same old law enforcement trend; technology deployed as an excuse generator.