Comment by Solvency
3 years ago
Idea: AI police sketch artist.
3D printed case. Resting on a table. Witness describes the suspect. 10 seconds later it prints out an AI generated ink sketch.
I mean why not? Sell it through to every police station in your state. You can even put a cute little police badge emblem on the case.
These ideas are what we should be worried about, not the paperclip thing.
How is that idea any more concerning than a regular human-drawn police sketch?
It might output a much more detailed image than a human-drawn sketch which could be less useful or more damaging than the vague sketch.
Imagine that a police officer is looking for someone matching the image but doesn't know that it's hallucinated from a vague description, they could let the real suspect go or incorrectly arrest someone who happens to look like the AI generated image but otherwise doesn't have any reason to be a suspect.
Police are already greatly overestimating the accuracy of their own facial recognition tools because they don't realize the limits of the technology, and this would just be worse.
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Lack of accountability.
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Didn't see the comments yesterday where HN achieved consensus that racist AI might be real but isn't that bad if it is?
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businesses, states, markets, any organization or other system that incorporates super-human agency is already AI, so far performed manually
the progression of technological "AI" has just been the automation and acceleration of their logic and operations
what paperclips are the police maximizing?
everything the alarmists are afraid of has already happened
arrests
Well, maybe it will be a plus then for minorities that all of the training data is of white people. I only joke, as this is a horrible idea all around, but I appreciate your creativity.
Not an expert, but my intuition is that most of the sketch artists job is asking the right questions. I would assume that most people would have trouble describing close friends or even their partners from memory.
Somewhat tangential: the "part of the brain" that is responsible for recognizing faces is incredibly well developed. That "peek-a-boo" game that you play with children? Every time you uncover your face millions of neurons in the childs brain suddenly fire giving them a jolt of "joy". The face recognition is so developed that we tend to see faces were there are none (face pareidolia).
... the point being that the brain does a lot of unconscious work recognizing individuals. Describing those individuals later consciously is pretty error prone.
As I understand it most police departments already use some kind of computer aided facial composite software instead of a traditional sketch artist. I can think of several dystopian reasons throwing AI into the mix might not be great, but tbe larger problem with this is why does it need to be sketched in pen and why does it need to be cute.
Might make a neat like coin op charicature thing though.
yeah something I thought about before, all of a sudden you're the most wanted person and police just complies because that's what the system says
would be crazy, probably a movie plot somewhere
I doubt it would change anything from what they do currently with police sketches; it would just be a faster, more accurate version. It's still just one piece of data they have to work from. The victim could describe the person to an AI, and it would update the 3D model on the fly.
"White Male, Curly hair, mole on face"
Generate.
"Good, but he had a larger nose, and blue eyes."
Generate.
"He was a bit more gaunt, and had some stubble."
Generate.
"Nearly there. More pronounced check bones, and make the jaw a bit softer"
Generate.
In 5 minutes or less, you could get a near exact picture of the potential criminal; something that might take up to an hour or more normally with a professional police sketch artist, and it could easily be in 3D too. There's tremendous value in that.
So, this is pretty much backwards from how police sketches actually work and it would likely obliterate any reliability from the system (which, as I understand, is very low already - and even worse for computer-generated imagery).
People have bad memories and bad perception in stressful situations. They don't actually know what the person looked like; they don't have a strong model in their brains. Police sketchers use clever questioning techniques to get details about features that people wouldn't otherwise think to describe or even realize they have knowledge about. The truth is that there is an absolute limitation to the effectiveness of any facial image reconstruction, which is the limits of human memory. Adding AI to the mix can't change that, but it's extremely likely to influence the witness to describing a less accurate face with higher confidence. In other words, a disaster.
This implies there is such a thing as a reliable eyewitness.
Even victims themselves are famously bad at identifying criminals.
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I think having the feedback throughout the process would probably taint the whole thing
This is basically the plot of "The Net" starring Sandra Bullock. A group of hackers steals her identity and creates a new one for her in various systems to cause the police to believe she is a wanted felon.
i love the idea! personally, i'd cast tom cruise in it cause he's just such a great actor.
Not too far from Minority Report
That opens up a whole new set of job opportunities for "prompt engineering"
Why not use an injection molded case?
hahaha that's not a bad idea at all
It's intriguing, because I wonder how this would affect police work. I'm imagining things here, but I assume that when a profile sketch is developed, all officers using that image know that it's "just a sketch" because, it looks like a drawing, because it is one.
So what happens if you now generate a photorealistic "sketch" based on a description? Are officers going to be sufficiently aware to know that's not a actual photo of the guy they are looking for, and act accordingly? Or is it going to heavily bias a manhunt effort? moreover, what happens when the photo randomly ends up close to someone present in the dataset?
The police already know those sketches are super fake lol. The point of those isn't to arrest the right person it's to have an excuse to hassle arrest or maybe kill a minority.
make the system output a sketch. boom - problem solved.
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