Just imagine you are standing in the front of your house playing with your two young children with your wife looking on. A police cruiser pulls up to your house, and you are handcuffed and placed under arrest. When your wife asks what you are being accused of doing, the police responded by saying: “Google it.”
The arrest was based on the identification of a security guard who was not an eyewitness to the crime you are supposed to have committed identified. The security guard’s identification was based on a blurry image of the crime as it was being committed by comparing it to the facial image taken from your driver’s license. Your driver’s license was selected using artificial intelligence (AI) as a likely match to the blurry image on the video. You were never told that your arrest was based on AI.
The police procedures clearly indicate that the process used is an investigative lead but not a cause for probable arrest. When the police have you in custody, the image on the video is clearly not you. But they continue to hold you for several hours. Even though this was clearly a mistaken arrest, your fingerprints and DNA are now in the system. Your account record remains.
Weeks after your arrest, your children begin to play games by arresting each other. They begin to accuse you of stealing their things.
Does this sound fantastical? It actually happened to Robert Williams, the first documented case of a person being falsely arrested using AI-generated facial recognition technology. AI technology has been known to falsely identify persons of color and of women, but it continues to be used.
There are those who say to be patient and AI will get better. Is patience warranted when the results of “training” can result in the destruction of a person’s life?
But think about other dimensions to AI in facial recognition. Suppose those who do the training purposely keep it biased. Do any of us know how far such AI technology can be manipulated to provide the “final solution” desired by those who want to preserve the so-called purity of a socio-economic elite? Might AI and its offspring become this generation’s concentration camp?
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“Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.” – W.H. Auden (poet)