Comment by Aromasin
3 years ago
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.
There is probably some "wisdom in crowds" for identifying a suspect. For example one person usually can't estimate the number of gumballs in a jar, but some studies have shown that if you survey 100 people you get a very accurate number. Maybe you need far less than that.. 2-3 people + AI perhaps comes up with a reasonably accurate estimation of reality.
Sadly, events are far more complex than counting items. For example, during the Columbine shooting, many students thought there were 4 shooters (while there were only 2), because at some point one of them remove their hoodie and the other turned their baseball cap backwards. The police thought there were shooters on the second floor because of an optical illusion.
These types of problems are very widespread - it's not rare that people misremember details because of the stress and trauma, and it's also well known that the process of describing/asking questions can cause bias into the victim, as seen in the many cases of people admitting crimes they didn't commit after long interogations.
I've also heard that the quality of police sketches was highly related to the person making the sketch, some have high correlation rate but that is not the norm i.e.: the average sketch artist might not be reliable on average.
JCS Psychology on Youtube is a great channel showing the processes happening during interrogations, if you're interested.
I think having the feedback throughout the process would probably taint the whole thing