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Comment by foxglacier

17 days ago

So what? There were false arrests and convictions made by misuse of line-ups, DNA, eye-witnesses, photos, bloodstains, fingerprints, etc. since forever. You must also blame all those other technologies, so what do you think the police should use to find suspects? In your view, the more help police have, the worse a job they'll do. Is that actually the trend?

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.”

So what???

This woman lost most of her material possessions, was terrorised by "goons"... The police do this stuff regularly, as black people, immigrants, "white trash" etcetera know well. Another opportunity, presented BY AI models for more routine police oppression

As the wise singer said: "Fuck the police!"

  • Exactly, it's the police's fault, as well as the wider system they operate in that enables that kind of abuse, and they do it anyway even with out AI.

    • AI is, in this case, a tool enabling it, because trawling large databases using AI allows finding people with a degree of similarity to a suspect that would reasonably constitute probable cause int he context of what was until fairly recently the norm for police work because that work relies on proximity and connections to the crime. The understanding of probable cause and what is necessary for it , given the actual investigative process in the case, including the use of large databases unconnected with the events and locality of the crime needs to adapt.

    • You're right that they often do a lot of harm.

      The point that you're missing is that, in a system where such abuses are possible, many of us really don't want one more tool in their box for them to fuck us with.

      Like, they already prove themselves incompetent- giving the power to track anyone in the US via a distributed ALPR system just makes them more dangerous. Giving them all these "AI" based tools does the same.

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