Concerns over AI surveillance in schools are intensifying after armed officers swarmed a 16-year-old student outside Kenwood High School in Baltimore when an AI gun detection system falsely flagged a Doritos bag as a firearm.
Allen was handcuffed at gunpoint. Police later showed him the AI-captured image that triggered the alert. The crumpled Doritos bag in his pocket had been mistaken for a gun.
I mean AI is a problem, but this wasn’t just AI- this was racist cops
land of the free 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
…
Not a surprise, after all it involves pigs and a racist bullshit machine.
How did I know the kid was Black before even seeing the picture
Don’t post images of text. Just copy and paste it .
The point is the image. And the reason it’s at the bottom is the artistic way to tell you how I felt; scrolling down the page, reading, then seeing the image and getting even angrier/annoyed.
okay but you could have copied the text and posted the image of the kid
But… why? The point is not the text, but catching the specific feeling of scrolling/reading down the article, and seeing the pic. If you want to read any text, open the article ffs
Screen readers for blind people can’t decipher text that’s in images
… And? I strongly doubt that either screen readers or manual reading would resemble the same effect. The entire point of the image is to feel the same as I did after reading the article. Scroll down the page, see the image, realize. That’s captured 1:1 by the screenshot. And not at all by manually copy-pasting the text, and then putting the image (with alt text) underneath. That wouldn’t be an Aha!-Moment, but utter confusion, because - again - the text is entirely irrelevant. Copying the text emphasizes its content, screenshotting emphasizes the moment.
The only actually useful way to convey the message would be to add an alt text to the screenshot - which idk how to do on lemmy properly, in contrast to Mastodon.
Besides, which modern screen reader does not have at least OCR?
Fun fact: making false police reports / swatting is illegal in most places. Which AI company is going to face criminal charges for putting this poor kids life at risk and traumatizing them?
“I don’t know what you expect us to do, the robot said we were in immediate mortal danger. So we started blasting…”
That’s why the AI was triggered in the first place … the kid is BLACK!!!
How many white kids with crumpled bags of chips in their pockets went away without any notice … as soon as you have one black kid in that situation … BOOM … call in the SWAT Team!
Well… first we need to know how that shit was trained. I’d guess, either they take rl pics and let humans decide arbitrarily, they take historic data of surveillance pics + if bastards were sent out, or they use historic pics + if something was actually found/confirmed.
All three will be heavily biased, especially #1. #2 would at least be based on “experts’” decisions, and #3 would be the least biased, but still way too much to be a basis for anything.
Because: Human behaviour can be fixed. With the right measurements, biased people/racists can be retrained or taken off-duty. However, as soon as such a system is trained on biased data, gl correcting that. And no one will feel themselves responsible anyway.
This is the scary thing about the development of any kind of AI we are building as a society generally … it will be heavily biased according to our general ideas of race, identity and beliefs … no matter how you cut it, develop it, influence it or deal with it, the AI will always take away our human based general ideas of right, wrong, biases, beliefs, and perceptions.
When you think about it, we (humanity as a whole) are trailer trash morons who dropped out of school years ago that shouldn’t have the responsibility of raising a child … but we went out and got pregnant anyway and now we’re raising a baby … sure, there are instances of trailer trash parents who do go out to raise decent people but I’ve seen my share of down and out people who raise children in absolutely the worst ways possible and churn out a whole generation of maladjusted people who end up with drug addictions, and their only hope is in doing the absolutely dumbest things possible to get by in life.
We’re dumb parents and we’re raising a new being-AI-intelligence-whatever into existence. What do you think that new child (or growing AI) will become?
It’s shocking just how biased the third is despite sounding (relatively) reasonable and unbiased. But bias is the entire nature of AI, that’s the whole point: biasing a machine to transform and distill data to arrive at a desired output.
Really, the instant anything is made into a process with or without AI there’s bias, and it’s inescapable.
ETA: I guess what I’m getting at is
Because: Human behaviour can be fixed. With the right measurements, biased people/racists can be retrained or taken off-duty.
is bias in and of itself
I like how it goes from student traumatic relation where he’s scared about his life
“It was like eight cop cars that came pulling up for us,” Allen told WBAL-TV 11 News. “They started walking toward me with guns, talking about ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?’”
“They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuff me. Then they searched me and found nothing,” he said.
“It was mainly like, am I gonna die? Are they going to kill me? “They showed me the picture, said that looks like a gun, I said, ‘no, it’s chips.’”
to the principal gaslighting whole situation like nothing happened, they just wanted to help him (not)die
“We understand how upsetting this was for the individual that was searched as well as the other students who witnessed the incident,” the principal wrote.
Hey, it could’ve been really bad publicity for the principal. Gotta feel for the poor guy, reputation could’ve been tainted for a few months. In all seriousness, a lot of school administrators seem to be the least empathetic or qualified people to be in charge of a school.
Seriously ? Kid should go to private psychiatrist that should give an opinion and after that they should sue principal, school, police and city over big money. If it was rich kid whole city will be apologizing.
They should sue, I agree.
It’s nacho gun.
The Oligarchy - now constructing sci-fi nightmares.
Fuck my life. Imagine if they just like, had a real person review the image before they deployed cops to draw down on him? Is that crazy?
Reaction time is a factor in a case like this. All the situation required was a cop walking up and talking to him, hand casually (heh) on pistol.
“Hey man, let me talk to you. School camera system thinks you have a gun and I gotta check.”
Say the kid did having a gun and was looking to use it, no one, let alone a 16-yo, is going to fumble fuck a gun out of his pocket before a cop can draw down on him. I wouldn’t bank on clearing a properly holstered and concealed pistol in this case. Maybe with some serious practice? Also, I am not a high school kid.
Most cops carry Glocks, so no safety to hassle with. Don’t know what retention system they now favor, but modern holsters allow the user to draw without thinking about releasing the weapon. I see zero risk in this approach.
People ready to start a shooting aren’t as approachable as you make it seem. Complicated solution but I don’t think your solution would work most times.
Say the kid did having a gun and was looking to use it, no one, let alone a 16-yo, is going to fumble fuck a gun out of his pocket before a cop can draw down on him
That’s extremely naive.
Nevermind the fact that he doesn’t have to. Guns don’t work like they do in the movies. When you shoot someone they don’t instantly drop dead.
Sometimes, unlike the movies, they do drop dead, instantly. Watching a shooting video is worse than Hollywood because people often fall like a cut puppet, no drama, don’t even fall over, straight down, horrific. The first cowboy movies depicted taking a bullet like that but audiences didn’t think it was realistic. 🤷🏻
Then there’s the kid that shot a YouTuber bullying him at the mall. Hit the big kid in the gut with a .380 (probably) at point blank range, dude just walked off, wasn’t even dripping.
As always, ballistics are weird and it “just depends”. But if a man with a 9mm, at point blank range, has the drop on you, think you could take the bullet, continue pulling a pistol out of your pocket and into action? As that man continues pumping bullets into you (as cops are trained to do)?
Again, I practice and I could not clear my concealed holster before that cop was hitting me. Aside from being stupidly unsafe, I won’t carry without a proper holster because I can’t get even my smallest guns out of my jeans in a hurry.
And no, I’m not going off Hollywood. I have dozens of guns, shoot 2-3 times a week at my own range, using a wide variety of weapons. I learn much from GunTubers, test for myself.
Sometimes. Not usually. Nor is it something a police officer is or should stake their life on.
But if a man with a 9mm, at point blank range, has the drop on you, think you could take the bullet, continue pulling a pistol out of your pocket and into action?
Can and do, all the time. (Assuming you mean the royal you).
I learn much from GunTubers, test for myself.
How many times have you tested being shot?
Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended”
“yeah this time it wasn’t a gun, but the kid is black for Christ’s sake, what did you expect us to do? So obviously its functioning as intended.”
This is pretty much my takeaway as well
The purpose of a system is what it does, indeed.
It successfully got a false positive that resulted in a black kid getting swarmed by police. Job well done, amirite?
I’ve been quoting that line (and the scene has been playing in my head) for months!
Don’t worry guys, they’re only putting these AI cameras in literally every city and doing it in shady ways without anyone knowing. And false flags like this happen very frequently.
Fucked-up-ness and the kid’s trauma aside, “Most swatted by clankers for chips” will make a pretty good superlative in the yearbook
A bag of doritos is a gun when its owner is POC
AI overlords gettin desperate for more chips
Have you seen the price of fucking chips lately? You’d be getting desperate too!
When we put a machine that has an unnaceptable error rate, decide who is guilty automatically, and then there is no longer human accountability in that system.
It will soon be ON YOU to know if you are innocent or not, and to shoot back if the death squad was sent after you in error.
Jesus fucking Christ, dude.
Sometime soon, it’ll be actual robots sent instead of police officers, I’m sure that’ll go well
