This is what happens when AI is tasked with surveillance.
Although AI involvement is not mentioned in the article, this quote might implicate that AI recognition could have been used:
“It’s got the incorrect date of birth, then it’s got a description of me, which says I have hat hair, which I found quite odd,” he said.
The problem with all that is that the whole process seems to be automated and that it hardly can be interrupted with human intervention.
Jones is also concerned the same thing might happen to somebody else who may not have the capacity to challenge the fine.
This indeed is concerning, as it already is challenging sometimes to deal with authorities, even when AI is not involved at all.
They took the offender’s name and DOB, looked up the name on whatever database they prefer - probably the electoral register, and then sent the fine to that address WITHOUT checking the DOB matched.
There no need to insert face recognition or ai to explain an administrative error.
And for the record I’m not defending ai or face recognition. I think, probably like most people on lemmy, that we need to be vigilant against digital surveillance and the authoritarianism it could very easily enable.
However, this is almost certainly not AI or face recognition and railing against it is wasting energy that could be better spent elsewhere. Instead of contributing to a cause it’s undermining it. It’s FUD.
fair enough, thanks for your response