How the N.Y.P.D.'S Facial Recognition Tool Landed the Wrong Man in Jail

Comments (2)

Ukv · 4h ago

> a spokesman said that the department never relied on it alone to make an arrest, and that the victim’s identification of Mr. Williams provided the evidence to charge him.

As a layman, it looks to me like the legal system is unprepared for the unintuitive issue that if you run a facial recognition search with a 0.000001 false positive rate on a database 10 million people, you get someone who:

1. Likely looks extremely close to the target

2. Has a 99% chance of not actually being the target

Eyewitness confirmation does little to shift that 99% because it'll be based largely on the same factors, rather than being independent evidence.

duxup · 3h ago

“Computer said you did it.” situations seem ripe for abuse and failure.

Even scarier with the black box that is AI…

How can I refute what a computer says if nobody knows how it came to a conclusion?

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How the N.Y.P.D.'S Facial Recognition Tool Landed the Wrong Man in Jail

Comments (2)