5 ms·

It is undoubtedly a feel-good story. Another “facial recognition feel good story” I’ve heard was a child porn case - the police ran the perpetrator’s image to f

by fwlr 4y ago

It is undoubtedly a feel-good story. Another “facial recognition feel good story” I’ve heard was a child porn case - the police ran the perpetrator’s image to find him and arrest him… and then ran the victim’s image to find her and inform her family, so they could get her therapy and support. Yet another story is the detective who ran a fugitive from a cold case and it pulled up an obituary for the fellow, effectively closing the case on the spot - not quite “feel good”, but it does serve to illustrate that these technologies have all sorts of applications in policing beyond “take a picture of the bad guy to send him to jail”. What to make of these stories? On the one hand, we’re only hearing these stories because these stories make them look good. On the other hand, these stories… kinda do make them look good? Giving defendants access to the evidence they need to save themselves from a miscarriage of justice, locating and protecting victims of the worst crimes imaginable - those are seriously good things! We should be careful to respect the gravity of those results in our calculus of how to treat these feel-good stories. Ultimately, my analysis is that facial recognition isn’t “good tech” or “bad tech”, it’s just “extraordinarily powerful tech”, and thus it will necessarily inherit the moral valence of whoever’s using it, and those users’ intentions and actions. If they give that tech to defense lawyers and the lawyers use it for good, sometimes you will get stories like “we put in a single frame of body cam footage and in a few seconds it gave us back the only person who could save our defendant” (and the facial recognition companies will be falling over themselves to tell you all about it). If they give that tech to sports stadiums and the stadiums use it for evil, sometimes you will get stories like “we put in the headshots of every lawyer who’s suing us, and prevented one from enjoying a football game with her friends and family” (and the media will be falling all over themselves to tell you all about it). If they give that tech to police, well, I would guess your opinion of them would end up roughly the same as your opinion of the police.

elif 4y ago
The obituary cold case example leads me to the opposite conclusion. A determined criminal can literally use another murder to close the case on their existing murder with a well crafted prosthetic.
- noduerme 4y ago
  or just run an obituary for yourself in the newspaper. The AI will rule you out as a suspect in all future cases.
  - fwlr 4y ago
    Facial recognition AI is just facial recognition AI, all it will do is pull up that newspaper clipping. It does not and cannot make any kind of ruling on who’s a suspect - that is a decision for the police to make. Now, if you have a dim view of the police who are using it, you might expect they will see an obituary and close the case on the spot without investigating further; if you have an optimistic view of the police, you might instead expect they will investigate that obituary to validate it - perhaps by asking the newspaper who ran that obituary, which would lead them to you or one of your associates. I don’t know what happened in that specific case I mentioned; it’s just a story I heard floating around the industry. I tend to have a positive view of police so my assumption in the absence of evidence is that if they cared enough to investigate a cold case, they would also care enough to do some digging on the obituary that turned up, but I don’t know. It’s valid to have a negative view of police! In that case, your assumption might be that they saw that obituary and used it as a convenient excuse to close a case and improve their metrics. This is part of why I say face rec inherits morality from its users.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      To be honest, when I wrote that I was imagining a step that probably doesn't exist yet, which would be connecting the facial recognition to some sort of LMM that would search the web along with private databases and filter results based on context before showing them to a human. So if, e.g. a photo of a person popped up on a camera in Las Vegas an hour after a murder committed by a very similar-looking person in Miami, the Vegas photo would be ruled out. Such an engine would be prone to all kinds of spoofing. I wasn't really thinking about the competence or vigilance of the police (which I think, as in any profession, varies wildly from place to place, officer to officer, and one circumstance to another). Even as it stands, though, the technology seems vulnerable to deepfakes. Someone in control of a private camera that fed into the database could get away with murder and frame someone else for it.

by fwlr 4y ago

elif 4y ago

The obituary cold case example leads me to the opposite conclusion. A determined criminal can literally use another murder to close the case on their existing murder with a well crafted prosthetic.

noduerme 4y ago
or just run an obituary for yourself in the newspaper. The AI will rule you out as a suspect in all future cases.
- fwlr 4y ago
  Facial recognition AI is just facial recognition AI, all it will do is pull up that newspaper clipping. It does not and cannot make any kind of ruling on who’s a suspect - that is a decision for the police to make. Now, if you have a dim view of the police who are using it, you might expect they will see an obituary and close the case on the spot without investigating further; if you have an optimistic view of the police, you might instead expect they will investigate that obituary to validate it - perhaps by asking the newspaper who ran that obituary, which would lead them to you or one of your associates. I don’t know what happened in that specific case I mentioned; it’s just a story I heard floating around the industry. I tend to have a positive view of police so my assumption in the absence of evidence is that if they cared enough to investigate a cold case, they would also care enough to do some digging on the obituary that turned up, but I don’t know. It’s valid to have a negative view of police! In that case, your assumption might be that they saw that obituary and used it as a convenient excuse to close a case and improve their metrics. This is part of why I say face rec inherits morality from its users.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    To be honest, when I wrote that I was imagining a step that probably doesn't exist yet, which would be connecting the facial recognition to some sort of LMM that would search the web along with private databases and filter results based on context before showing them to a human. So if, e.g. a photo of a person popped up on a camera in Las Vegas an hour after a murder committed by a very similar-looking person in Miami, the Vegas photo would be ruled out. Such an engine would be prone to all kinds of spoofing. I wasn't really thinking about the competence or vigilance of the police (which I think, as in any profession, varies wildly from place to place, officer to officer, and one circumstance to another). Even as it stands, though, the technology seems vulnerable to deepfakes. Someone in control of a private camera that fed into the database could get away with murder and frame someone else for it.