AI Gets Wrong Woman Jailed for Six Months, Life Ruined
56 points by vaxman 2 hours ago | 21 comments
hyperhello 52 minutes ago
In Oregon the courts just ruled that since defendants weren’t provided a public defender in a certain amount of time, their cases were voided. There was an outcry, of course. But the ruling was sound: the pain had to be pushed to the part of the system that was failing. An honest system does not allow things like this; the accused either needs to either have a competent advocate, or the case is void.
replygnabgib 2 hours ago
Discussion (730 points, 2 days ago, 379 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356968
replyrectang 45 minutes ago
My takeaway from the huge discussion thread yesterday was that the big divide among HN commenters is whether or not purveyors of AI tech have any responsibility to account for automation bias in their users.
replyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_bias
> Automation bias is the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct.
In other words, if it is foreseeable that the tool will be misused, what does that mean for the toolmaker?
OutOfHere 34 minutes ago
Those deploying AI where it can affect individuals must ensure that the UI always prominently shows the failure rate.
replyFor example, if a person's face is matched to a ID, the UI must show not just the match percentage (which is very misleading) but also contextually the odds of getting it wrong. For example, if there are 7 IDs whose face is at least a 95% feature match to the thief, the odds of getting it wrong are at least 6 out of 7, meaning the chances of an accurate classification is just 14% at best!
mvrckhckr 56 minutes ago
AI is a tool. It is humans who abdicate their responsibility (and thinking).
replyrighthand 50 minutes ago
I’m sure the cops got a slap on the wrist and their lives are fine. ACAB.
replyodshoifsdhfs 50 minutes ago
But have they have tried the latest models? I understand this from October last year but Opus 4.6 is light and day and I wasn't a believer but now with this latest model it changed everything. it hasn't send any innocent person to jail yet and identified all my neighboorhood creeps 100%.
reply/s
She apparently could not afford a lawyer, who would have pointed out that she was provably at home (transactions, etc.) at the time the crime was committed in another state.
Really it's not specifically AIs fault, though it made the error easier.
The AI was akin to an unreliable eye-witness in this case, although people's trust in the AI's judgement may have been higher than a human eyewitness?
The police made an inexcusable mistake out of carelessness. They simply couldn't be bothered to spend five minutes fact-checking the facial recognition match, and it caused catastrophic harm to an innocent woman.
And what's the headline? "AI did this". It's a new and exciting way for people to shirk accountability for their actions. We're already seeing it in the reporting on the Iranian school bombed by the United States: blame AI for selecting the target, and not the humans in the loop who failed to do the most basic due diligence.
Don't let the AI system off the hook by all means, but by focusing on it to this extent, the narrative ignores (deliberately?) the hugely negligent actions of the police et al involved.
So it’s still reasonable to be skeptical of (or outright reject) the use of the technology in systems that can ruin or end people’s lives.