Without even looking at the AI part, I have a single question: Did anybody investigate? That's it.
Whether it's AI that flagged her, or a witness who saw her, or her IP address appeared on the logs. Did anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm. But that's not what happened, they saw the data and said "we got her".
But this is the worst part of the story:
> And after her ordeal, she never plans to return to the state: “I’m just glad it’s over,” she told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”
That's the lesson? Never go back to North Dakota. No, challenge the entire system. A few years back it was a kid accused of shoplifting [0]. Then a man dragged while his family was crying [1]. Unless we fight back, we are all guilty until cleared.
Yes, of course someone should have investigated, but the larger point here is that people don’t because they are being sold a false narrative that AI is infallible and can do anything.
We could sit here all day arguing “you should always validate the results”, but even on HN there are people loudly advocating that you don’t need to.
"The trauma, loss of liberty, and reputational damage cannot be easily fixed,” Lipps' lawyers told CNN in an email.
That sounds a LOT like a statement you make for before suing for damages, not to mention they literally say "Her lawyers are exploring civil rights claims but have yet to file a lawsuit, they said."
This lady probably just wants to go back to normal life and get some money for the hell they put her in. She has never been on a airplane before, I doubt she is going to take on the entire system like you suggest. Easier said than done to "challenge the entire system", what does that even mean exactly?
It was worse than that, the reporting from an earlier story[0]
...Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog.
There is not a jury in the country that will side against the woman. I am not even sure who will make the best pop culture mashup - John Wick or a country song writer?
(Also, what happened to journalism - no Oxford comma?)
The vendor they used, Clearview AI, does not allow you to request data deletion unless you live in one of the half-dozen states that legally mandate it.
Sadly this is really the only tool we have right now. Just have to keep spamming them with delete requests because once they delete it’ll end up back in their database eventually.
To get your data deleted in the states that require it you have to submit a photo of yourself which I really don't want to do for a sketchy company with ties to evil billionaire Peter Thiel.
First, the detective used the FaceSketchID system, which has been around since around 2014. It is not new or uniquely tied to modern AI.
Second, the system only suggests possible matches. It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant.
The real question is why she was held in jail for four months. That is the part that I do not understand. My understanding is that there is 30-day limit (the requesting state must pick up the defendant within 30 day).
Regarding the individual involved, Angela Lipps, she has reportedly been arrested before, so it is possible she was on parole. So maybe they were holding her because of that?
In the US there are no consequences for people in power failing to follow procedures, laws or regulations - except for being told to stop doing whatever illegal thing they're doing, and possibly getting sued way down the line, which gets paid by taxpayers.
From reading more into the case, it seems the issue may be related to how her lawyer handled the case.
They probably did “identity challenge” arguing that she is not the right person. But from Tennessee’s perspective, she was considered the correct person to be arrested, so there was no “mistaken identity” in their system. In other words, North Dakota Wanted person x and here is person x.
Once a judge in North Dakota reviewed the full evidence (and found that person they issued warrant for arrest is not one they want), the case was dismissed.
Case in point, the US is supposed to have a strong mechanism to prevent this sort of thing. The right to a speedy trial.
In practice they generally make it de facto impossible to get one. You get charged with something and if you want to have the trial right now, before you have any idea what's going on, then you can insist, which basically nobody does because it's pretty crazy to go in blind. But if you don't then you've "waived your right to a speedy trial" and now you're stuck in limbo until the system feels like getting to you.
> It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant.
This is how it should work, but I still think it is important to discuss these failures in the context of AI risks.
One of the largest real-world dangers of AI (as we define that now) is that it is often confidently wrong and this is a terrible situation when it comes to human factors.
A lot of people are wired in such a way that perceived confidence hacks right through their amygdala and they immediately default to trust, no matter how unwarranted.
Her picture was used as part of a fake id card, in the commission of a crime. The fuzzy camera footage looked like her (from stills I've seen) and her picture was on the fake ID. Those 2 circumstantial items were, apparently, enough to have a warrant issued.
They picked her up in TN and held her for 4 months, even after:
The ND police knew the ID was fake and the person using it was not her.
The ND police knew she had been in TN before, during, and after the crime.
She is still technically a suspect, even after all of this has come out.
I've been hearing "it's not just... it's a" touted as an AI sign recently, personally I think it's an AI sign because it's a human thinking shortcut sign, and AI copies it, but it would be funny if AI wrote the article and then hallucinated this specific money quote.
I doubt this happened here, but FWIW, AI does have a habit of "cleaning up" (read: hallucinating) interview transcript quotes if you ask it to go through a transcript and pull quotes. You have to prompt AI very specifically to get it to not "clean up" the quotes when you ask it to do that task.
... which is why the institutions that assign responsibility and consequences need to make it really clear that excuse won't fly. With illustrative examples.
There is enormous variability in how hard a tool is to use correctly, how likely it is to go wrong, and how severe the consequences are. AI has a wide range on all those variables because its use cases vary so widely compared to a hammer.
The use case here is police facial recognition. Not hitting nails. The parent wasn't saying "AI is a liability" with no context.
This tool, however, is specifically built for mass surveillance. It serves no other purpose. The tool is broken, and everybody knows it. The tool makers are at least as guilty as those who use it.
What kind of outcome results from misuse? Clearly a hammer's misuse has very little in common with a global, hivemind network used in high-stake campaigns.
Now, if I misused a hammer and it hurt everyone's thumb in my country, then maybe what you said would have some merit.
Otherwise, I'd say it's an extremely lazy argument
This, she likely had a shitty public defender that did the bare minimum requirements because they were catering to paying clients. The state was playing hardball because they wanted to make a profit off the poor person with a shitty defense and the public defender was sitting on the bench at a teeball tournament because they werent getting paid enough and didn't want to try.
What? Women are much more sympathetic figures when it comes to crime and punishment. And there are 10x more men in prison in america than women. If you were trying to "introduce" some nefarious law enforcement system to the US you would use it on undesirable men first (drug addicts and gang members)
Probably just reading the room, with States like texas making abortions illegal and allowing random citizens from enforcing that.
Famously, abortions are a woman thing.
Anyway, looking through the facts, it's just some random woman. There's better evidence that these facial recognition systems are much worse at minorities rather than genders.
Although you can probably interpret the facts differently, we've seen how any search function gets enshittified: Once people get used to searching for things, they tend to select something that returns results vs something that fails to return results.
Rather than the user blaming themselves, they blame the searcher. As such, any search system overtime will bias towards returning search (eg, Outlook), rather than accuracy.
So if these systems easily miss certain classes of people, women, minorities, they'll more likely be surfaced as inaccurate matches rather than men who'll have a higher confidence of being screened out.
This appears to be The Sort in action again. The 50% of Americans below IQ 100 also need jobs and so on. Perhaps with AI pushing out people from high-intelligence jobs, we will get a large number of intelligent people in jobs like police or retail pharmacists or so on. Currently, these guys can barely read text and follow instructions. In fact, most of them are likely functionally illiterate and are coaxed through their programs by a system that is punished if it does not pass people.
The average policeman will find his brain sorely taxed by the average incident report form. Describing the phrase "false positive" to them is like trying to explain calculus to a mouse.
Has it not been fairly common to require police officers to have a bachelor’s degree? Or an associate’s? I think recently that has been relaxed but I’ve lived in places where it was absolutely a requirement.
Police departments are known to avoid hiring people that get high marks in school, under the principle that such individuals will become bored with the job and quit. They literally look for average people with average intelligence: C students.
Now factor in the slow decline of our educational institutions, where grade inflation has systematically diminished the credibility of a degree. I would wager that many C students today would have failed out completely 30 years ago.
In that light, it is not surprising that people are seeing ICE agents behave like brown shirts. No one in power wants those people asking any kind of hard questions about what they are being ordered to do.
Without even looking at the AI part, I have a single question: Did anybody investigate? That's it.
Whether it's AI that flagged her, or a witness who saw her, or her IP address appeared on the logs. Did anybody bothered to ask her "where were you the morning of july 10th between 3 and 4pm. But that's not what happened, they saw the data and said "we got her".
But this is the worst part of the story:
> And after her ordeal, she never plans to return to the state: “I’m just glad it’s over,” she told WDAY. “I’ll never go back to North Dakota.”
That's the lesson? Never go back to North Dakota. No, challenge the entire system. A few years back it was a kid accused of shoplifting [0]. Then a man dragged while his family was crying [1]. Unless we fight back, we are all guilty until cleared.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/29/apple_sis_lawsuit/
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394
Yes, of course someone should have investigated, but the larger point here is that people don’t because they are being sold a false narrative that AI is infallible and can do anything.
We could sit here all day arguing “you should always validate the results”, but even on HN there are people loudly advocating that you don’t need to.
We can barely convince powers thar be that eye-witness testimony is unreliable, after all.
I think you missed many important points.
"The trauma, loss of liberty, and reputational damage cannot be easily fixed,” Lipps' lawyers told CNN in an email.
That sounds a LOT like a statement you make for before suing for damages, not to mention they literally say "Her lawyers are exploring civil rights claims but have yet to file a lawsuit, they said."
This lady probably just wants to go back to normal life and get some money for the hell they put her in. She has never been on a airplane before, I doubt she is going to take on the entire system like you suggest. Easier said than done to "challenge the entire system", what does that even mean exactly?
It was worse than that, the reporting from an earlier story[0]
There is not a jury in the country that will side against the woman. I am not even sure who will make the best pop culture mashup - John Wick or a country song writer?
(Also, what happened to journalism - no Oxford comma?)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356968
6 replies →
The vendor they used, Clearview AI, does not allow you to request data deletion unless you live in one of the half-dozen states that legally mandate it.
https://www.clearview.ai/privacy-and-requests
I have suddenly becomes very interested in New York's S1422 Biometric Privacy Act.
related https://noyb.eu/en/criminal-complaint-against-facial-recogni...
Sadly this is really the only tool we have right now. Just have to keep spamming them with delete requests because once they delete it’ll end up back in their database eventually.
To get your data deleted in the states that require it you have to submit a photo of yourself which I really don't want to do for a sketchy company with ties to evil billionaire Peter Thiel.
This is a weak or misleading story about AI.
First, the detective used the FaceSketchID system, which has been around since around 2014. It is not new or uniquely tied to modern AI.
Second, the system only suggests possible matches. It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant.
The real question is why she was held in jail for four months. That is the part that I do not understand. My understanding is that there is 30-day limit (the requesting state must pick up the defendant within 30 day). Regarding the individual involved, Angela Lipps, she has reportedly been arrested before, so it is possible she was on parole. So maybe they were holding her because of that?
Can someone clarify how that process works?
In the US there are no consequences for people in power failing to follow procedures, laws or regulations - except for being told to stop doing whatever illegal thing they're doing, and possibly getting sued way down the line, which gets paid by taxpayers.
From reading more into the case, it seems the issue may be related to how her lawyer handled the case.
They probably did “identity challenge” arguing that she is not the right person. But from Tennessee’s perspective, she was considered the correct person to be arrested, so there was no “mistaken identity” in their system. In other words, North Dakota Wanted person x and here is person x.
Once a judge in North Dakota reviewed the full evidence (and found that person they issued warrant for arrest is not one they want), the case was dismissed.
4 replies →
Case in point, the US is supposed to have a strong mechanism to prevent this sort of thing. The right to a speedy trial.
In practice they generally make it de facto impossible to get one. You get charged with something and if you want to have the trial right now, before you have any idea what's going on, then you can insist, which basically nobody does because it's pretty crazy to go in blind. But if you don't then you've "waived your right to a speedy trial" and now you're stuck in limbo until the system feels like getting to you.
1 reply →
> It is still up to the detective to investigate further and decide whether to pursue charges. And then it is up to court to issue the warrant.
This is how it should work, but I still think it is important to discuss these failures in the context of AI risks.
One of the largest real-world dangers of AI (as we define that now) is that it is often confidently wrong and this is a terrible situation when it comes to human factors.
A lot of people are wired in such a way that perceived confidence hacks right through their amygdala and they immediately default to trust, no matter how unwarranted.
I wish I could find the link, but I believe she was in jail on parole violation, unrelated to anything that the "AI" flagged her on.
Her picture was used as part of a fake id card, in the commission of a crime. The fuzzy camera footage looked like her (from stills I've seen) and her picture was on the fake ID. Those 2 circumstantial items were, apparently, enough to have a warrant issued.
They picked her up in TN and held her for 4 months, even after:
The ND police knew the ID was fake and the person using it was not her. The ND police knew she had been in TN before, during, and after the crime.
She is still technically a suspect, even after all of this has come out.
1 reply →
She was not
Source: I live in Fargo and have been following this story closely. Everyone here is pissed
1 reply →
That is the first I have heard of that. A small unexplained blurb in this article. Already in jail on parole violation..
Maybe she objected to the extradition order without good counsel.
"I aint never been to N.Dakota". She found out the hard way how the law works..
What about the banks being hit. Surely they have good cameras. This was bad mojo. I would think a Wells Fargo/BoA has a unit for this stuff.
Finincial crimes handled like this. The banks will be sued too I suspect.. Deep pockets settle out.
Earlier discussion (405 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356968
Money quote from someone quoted in the article:
"[I]t’s not just a technology problem, it’s a technology and people problem."
I can't. I just can't.
I've been hearing "it's not just... it's a" touted as an AI sign recently, personally I think it's an AI sign because it's a human thinking shortcut sign, and AI copies it, but it would be funny if AI wrote the article and then hallucinated this specific money quote.
I doubt this happened here, but FWIW, AI does have a habit of "cleaning up" (read: hallucinating) interview transcript quotes if you ask it to go through a transcript and pull quotes. You have to prompt AI very specifically to get it to not "clean up" the quotes when you ask it to do that task.
1 reply →
A lot of dumb shit happens in this arena, where if you had just one smart cop, it could have been prevented. Here’s one from 2023:
https://youtu.be/lPUBXN2Fd_E
AI is a liability issue waiting to happen. And this is just another example.
It's the opposite, it's absolution from liability. "The AI did it" is the ultimate excuse to avoid accepting responsibility and consequences.
Courts are already refusing to accept this excuse.
https://pub.towardsai.net/the-air-gapped-chronicles-the-cour...
... which is why the institutions that assign responsibility and consequences need to make it really clear that excuse won't fly. With illustrative examples.
It’s a tool. Used incorrectly will lead to errors. Just like a hammer, used incorrectly could hit the users finger.
There is enormous variability in how hard a tool is to use correctly, how likely it is to go wrong, and how severe the consequences are. AI has a wide range on all those variables because its use cases vary so widely compared to a hammer.
The use case here is police facial recognition. Not hitting nails. The parent wasn't saying "AI is a liability" with no context.
2 replies →
This tool, however, is specifically built for mass surveillance. It serves no other purpose. The tool is broken, and everybody knows it. The tool makers are at least as guilty as those who use it.
1 reply →
Used incorrectly will lead to errors.
Only one small little problem --- there is no way to tell if you are using it "correctly".
The only way to be sure is to not use it.
Using it basically boils down to, "Do you feel lucky?".
The Fargo police didn't get lucky in this case. And now the liability kicks in.
9 replies →
What kind of outcome results from misuse? Clearly a hammer's misuse has very little in common with a global, hivemind network used in high-stake campaigns.
Now, if I misused a hammer and it hurt everyone's thumb in my country, then maybe what you said would have some merit.
Otherwise, I'd say it's an extremely lazy argument
Unlike hammers people preface things with "claude says", etc. I never see that kind of distancing with tools that aren't AI.
Dynamite is a tool. But we don't hand it out to anyone who wants to play with it.
10 replies →
AI feels closer to a firearm than a hammer when accessing law enforcement's ability to quickly do massive, unrecoverable harm.
[flagged]
I would say much more likely that it was because she was poor and couldn't afford a good lawyer.
This, she likely had a shitty public defender that did the bare minimum requirements because they were catering to paying clients. The state was playing hardball because they wanted to make a profit off the poor person with a shitty defense and the public defender was sitting on the bench at a teeball tournament because they werent getting paid enough and didn't want to try.
What? Women are much more sympathetic figures when it comes to crime and punishment. And there are 10x more men in prison in america than women. If you were trying to "introduce" some nefarious law enforcement system to the US you would use it on undesirable men first (drug addicts and gang members)
You think they deliberately chose to do this to a woman? Why?
Probably just reading the room, with States like texas making abortions illegal and allowing random citizens from enforcing that.
Famously, abortions are a woman thing.
Anyway, looking through the facts, it's just some random woman. There's better evidence that these facial recognition systems are much worse at minorities rather than genders.
Interesting biases are own-gendeR: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11841357/
Racial bias:
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/unmasking-bias...
Miss rates:
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10358566
Although you can probably interpret the facts differently, we've seen how any search function gets enshittified: Once people get used to searching for things, they tend to select something that returns results vs something that fails to return results.
Rather than the user blaming themselves, they blame the searcher. As such, any search system overtime will bias towards returning search (eg, Outlook), rather than accuracy.
So if these systems easily miss certain classes of people, women, minorities, they'll more likely be surfaced as inaccurate matches rather than men who'll have a higher confidence of being screened out.
That's how I interpret this 2 second commment.
This appears to be The Sort in action again. The 50% of Americans below IQ 100 also need jobs and so on. Perhaps with AI pushing out people from high-intelligence jobs, we will get a large number of intelligent people in jobs like police or retail pharmacists or so on. Currently, these guys can barely read text and follow instructions. In fact, most of them are likely functionally illiterate and are coaxed through their programs by a system that is punished if it does not pass people.
The average policeman will find his brain sorely taxed by the average incident report form. Describing the phrase "false positive" to them is like trying to explain calculus to a mouse.
Has it not been fairly common to require police officers to have a bachelor’s degree? Or an associate’s? I think recently that has been relaxed but I’ve lived in places where it was absolutely a requirement.
I don’t think they’re as stupid as you suggest.
Police departments are known to avoid hiring people that get high marks in school, under the principle that such individuals will become bored with the job and quit. They literally look for average people with average intelligence: C students.
Now factor in the slow decline of our educational institutions, where grade inflation has systematically diminished the credibility of a degree. I would wager that many C students today would have failed out completely 30 years ago.
In that light, it is not surprising that people are seeing ICE agents behave like brown shirts. No one in power wants those people asking any kind of hard questions about what they are being ordered to do.
Having a degree is a very low bar for intelligence.
> I don’t think they’re as stupid as you suggest.
I'll just leave this here:
https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...
1 reply →
This has been posted at least twice before on HN.