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Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon

693 points| antongribok | 4 months ago |dexerto.com

436 comments

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Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.

neilv|4 months ago

> Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,” saying its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.”

It just created a situation in which a bunch of people with guns were told that some teen had a gun. That's a very unsafe situation that the system created, out of nothing.

And some teen may be traumatized. Again, unsafe.

Incidentally, the article's quotes make this teen sound more adult than anyone who sold or purchased this technology product.

omnipresent12|4 months ago

https://www2.ljworld.com/news/schools/2025/aug/07/lawrence-s...

Another false positive by one of these leading content filters schools use - the kid said something stupid in a group chat and an AI reported it to the school, and the school contacted the police. The kid was arrested, stripped searched, and held for 24 hours without access to their parents or counsel. They ultimately had to spend time in probation, a full mental health evaluation, and go to an alternative school for a period of time. They are suing Gaggle, who claims they never intended their system to be used that way.

These kinds of false positives are incredibly common. I interviewed at one of their competitors (Lightspeed), and they actually provide a paid service where they have humans review all the alerts before being forwarded to the school or authorities. This is a paid addon, though.

b00ty4breakfast|4 months ago

>...its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.

Oh look, a corporation refusing to take responsibility for literally anything. How passe.

DrewADesign|4 months ago

Engineer: hey I made this cool thing that can help people in public safety roles process information and make decisions more efficiently! It gives false positives but you save more time than it takes less time to weed through them.

Someone nearby: well what if they use it to replace human thinking instead of augment it?

Engineer: well they would be ridiculous. Nobody would ever think that’s a good idea.

Marketing Team: it seems like this lands best when positioning it as a decision-making tool. Let’s get some metrics on how much faster it is at making decisions than people are.

Sales Rep: ok, Captain, let’s dive into our flagship product, DecisionMaker Pro, the totally automated security monitoring agent…

::6 months later—some kid is being held at gunpoint over snacks.::

random3|4 months ago

It’s actually “AI swarmed” since no human reasoning, only execution, was exerted - basically have an AI directing resources.

janalsncm|4 months ago

In any system, there are false positives and false negatives. In some situations (like a high recall disease detection) false negatives are much worse than false positives, because the cost of a false positive is a more rigorous screening.

But in this case both are bad. If it was a false negative students might need therapy for a more tragic reason.

Aside from improving the quality of the detection model, we should try to reduce the “cost” of both failure modes as much as possible. Putting a human in the loop or having secondary checks are ways to do that.

bilbo0s|4 months ago

>And some teen may be traumatized.

Um. That's not really the danger here.

The danger is that it's as clear as day that in the future someone is gonna be killed. That's not just a possibility. It's a certainty given the way the system is set up.

This tech is not supposed to be used in this fashion. It's not ready.

tartoran|4 months ago

"“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. “Our counselors will provide direct support to the students who were involved.”"

Make them pay money for false positives instead of direct support and counselling. This technology is not ready for production, it should be in a lab not in public buildings such as schools.

xbar|4 months ago

Charge the superintendent with swatting.

Decision-maker accountability is the only thing that halts bad decision-making.

dekken_|4 months ago

> Make them pay money

It already cost money paying for the time and resources to be misappropriated.

There needs to be resignations, or jail time.

russdill|4 months ago

I wonder how much more likely it is to get a false positive from a black student.

joe_the_user|4 months ago

I assume they were provide gift cards good for psychotherapy sessions.

akoboldfrying|4 months ago

> Make them pay money for false positives instead of direct support and counselling.

Agreed.

> This technology is not ready for production

No one wants stuff like this to happen, but nearly all technologies have risks. I don't consider that a single false positive outweighs all of its benefits; it would depend on the rates of false and true positives, and the (subjective) value of each (both high in this case, though I'd say preventing 1 shooting is unequivocally of more value than preventing 1 innocent person being unnecessarily held at gunpoint).

froobius|4 months ago

Stuff like this feels like some company has managed to monetize an open source object detection model like YOLO [1], creating something that could be cobbled together relatively easily, and then sold it as advance AI capabilities. (You'd hope they've have at least fine-tuned it / have a good training dataset.)

We've got a model out there now that we've just seen has put someone's life at risk... Does anyone apart from that company actually know how accurate it is? What it's been trained on? Its false positive rate? If we are going to start rolling out stuff like this, should it not be mandatory for stats / figures to be published? For us to know more about the model, and what it was trained on?

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02640

EdwardDiego|4 months ago

And it feels like they missed the "human in the loop" bit. One day this company is likely to find itself on the end of a wrongful death lawsuit.

dfxm12|4 months ago

[deleted]

jawns|4 months ago

I expect that John Bryan -- who produces content as The Civil Rights Lawyer https://thecivilrightslawyer.com -- will have something to say about it.

He frequently criticizes the legality of police holding people at gunpoint based on flimsy information, because the law considers it a use of force, which needs to be justified. For instance, he's done several videos about "high risk" vehicle stops, where a car is mistakenly flagged as stolen, and the occupants are forced to the ground at gunpoint.

My take is that if both the AI automated system and a "human in the loop" police officer looked at the picture and reasonably believed that the object in the image was a gun, then the stop might have been justified.

But if the automated system just sent the officers out without having them review the image beforehand, that's much less reasonable justification.

cyanydeez|4 months ago

Someday there'll be a lawyer in court telling us how strong the AI evidence was because companies are spending billions of dollars on it.

kelnos|4 months ago

The article says the police later showed the student the photo that triggered the alert. He had a crumpled-up Doritos bag in his pocket. So there was no gun in the photo, just a pocket bulge that the AI thought was a gun... which sounds like a hallucination, not any actual reasonable pattern-matching going on.

But the fact that the police showed the photo does suggest that maybe they did manually review the photo before going out. If that's the case, do wonder how much the AI influenced their own judgment, though. That is, if there was no AI involved, and police were just looking at real-time surveillance footage, would they have made the same call on their own? Possibly not: it feels reasonable to assume that they let the fact of the AI flagging it override their own judgment to some degree.

hinkley|4 months ago

Is use of force without justification automatically excessive force or is there a gray area?

mentalgear|4 months ago

Ah, the coming age of Palantir's all seeing platform; and Peter Thiel becoming the shadow Emperor. Too bad non-deterministic ml systems are prone to errors that risk lives when applied wrongly to crucial parts of society. But in an authoritarian state, those will be hidden away anyway, so there's nothing to see here: move along folks. Yes, surveillance and authoritarianism go hand in hand, ask China. It's important to protest these methods and push lawmakers to act against them; now, before it's too late.

MiiMe19|4 months ago

I might be missing something but I don' think this article isn't about palantir or any of their products

seanhunter|4 months ago

The article is about omnialert, not palantir, but don’t let the facts get in the way of your soapbox rant.

protocolture|4 months ago

I dont think a guy who knows so much about the anti christ could be wrong.

rolph|4 months ago

Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,” saying its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.”

prioritize your own safety by not attending any location fitted with such a system, or deemed to be such a dangerous environment that such a system is desired.

the AI "swatted" someone.

bilbo0s|4 months ago

Calling it today. This company is going to get innocent kids killed.

How many packs of Twizzlers, or Doritos, or Snickers bars are out there in our schools?

First time it happens, there will be an explosion of protests. Especially now that the public knows that the system isn't working but the authorities kept using it anyway.

This is a really bad idea right now. The technology is just not there yet.

etothet|4 months ago

The corporate version of "It's a feature, not a bug."

nyeah|4 months ago

Clearly it did not prioritize human safety.

tencentshill|4 months ago

"rapid human verification." at gunpoint. The Torment Nexus has nothing on these AI startups.

palmotea|4 months ago

Why did they waste time verifying? The police should have eliminated the threat before any harm could be done. Seconds count when you're keeping people safe.

drak0n1c|4 months ago

The dispatch relayer and responding officers should at least have ready access to a screen where they can see a video/image of the raw footage that triggered the AI alert. If it is a false alarm, they will better see it and react accordingly, and if it is a real threat they will better understand the initial context and who may have been involved.

Etheryte|4 months ago

Next up, a captcha that verifies you're not a robot by swatting you and checking at gunpoint.

proee|4 months ago

Walking through TSA scanners, I always get that unnerving feeling I will get pulled aside. 50% of the time they flag my cargo pants because of the zipper pockets - There is nothing in them but the scanner doesn't like them.

Now we get the privilege of walking by AI security cameras placed in random locations, hoping they don't flag us.

There's a ton of money to be made with this kind of global frisking, so lots of pressure to roll out more and more systems.

How does this not spiral out of control?

mpeg|4 months ago

To be fair, at least you can choose not to wear the cargo pants.

A friend of mine once got pulled aside for extra checks and questioning after he had already gone through the scanners, because he was waiting for me on the other side to walk to the gates together and the agent didn't like that he was "loitering" – guess his ethnicity...

malux85|4 months ago

Speak up citizens!

Email the state congressman and tell them what you think.

Since (pretty much) nobody does this, if a few hundred people do it, they will sit up and take notice. It takes less people than you might think.

Since coordinating this with a bunch of strangers (I.e. the public) is difficult, the most effective way is to normalise speaking up in our culture. Of course normalising it will increase the incoming comm rate, which will slowly decrease the effectiveness but even post that state, it’s better than where we are, which is silent public apathy

xp84|4 months ago

Get Precheck or global entry. I only do a scanner every 5 years or so when I get pulled at random for it. Otherwise it's metal detector only. Unless your zippers have such chunky metal that they set that off you'll be fine. My belt and watch don't.

Note: Precheck is incredibly quick and easy to get; and GE is time consuming and annoying, but has its benefits if you travel internationallly. Both give the same benefits at TSA.

Second note: let's pretend someone replied "I shouldn't have to do that just to be treated...blah blah" and that I replied, "maybe not, but a few bucks could still solve this problem, if it bothers you enough that's worth it to you."

voidUpdate|4 months ago

I don't often fly, but back when I went to germany on a school trip, on the return flight I got pulled aside into a small room by whatever the german equivalent of TSA is and they swabbed the skin of my belly, and the inside of my bag. I'm guessing it was a drugs check and I must have just looked shifty because I get nervous in situations like that, but I do find it funny that they pulled me aside instead of the guys with me who almost certainly had something on them.

Also my partner has told me that apparently my armpits sometimes smell of weed or beer, despite me not coming in contact with either of those for a very long time, and now I definitely don't want to get taken into a small room by a TSA person (After some googling, apparently those smells can be associated with high stress)

walkabout|4 months ago

I already adjust my clothing choices when flying to account for TSA's security theater make-work bullshit. Wonder how long before I'm doing that when preparing to go to other public places.

(I suppose if I attended pro sports games or large concerts, I'd be doing it for those, too)

JustExAWS|4 months ago

Getting pulled aside by TSA for secondary screening is nowhere in the ball park of being rushed at gunpoint as a teenager and told to lay down on the ground where one false move will get you shot by a trigger happy cop that probably won’t face any consequences - especially if the innocent victim is a Black male.

In fact, they will probably demonize the victim to find sn excuse why he deserved to get shot.

more_corn|4 months ago

Why don’t you pay the bribe and skip the security theater scanner? It’s cheap. Most travel cards reimburse for it too.

jason-phillips|4 months ago

I got pulled aside because I absentmindedly showed them my concealed carry permit, not my driver's license. I told them I was a consultant working for their local government and was going back to Austin. No harm no foul.

dheera|4 months ago

The TSA scanners also trigger easily on crotch sweat.

rglover|4 months ago

This may be mean, but we should really be careful about just handing AI over to technically illiterate people. They're far more likely to blind trust the LLM/AI output than someone who may be more experienced and take a beat. AI in an agentic-state society (what we have in America at least) is an absolute ticking time bomb. Honestly, this is what AI safety teams should be concentrated on: making sure people who think the computer is infallible understand that, no, it isn't, and you shouldn't just assume what it tells you is correct.

hollow-moe|4 months ago

We already handed over the Internet to technically illetrate people long time ago.

hanspeter|4 months ago

It's basically a failure of setting up the proper response playbook.

Instead of:

1. AI detects gun on surveillance

2. Dispatch armed police to location

It should be:

1. AI detects gun on surveillance

2. Human reviews the pictures and verifies the threat

3. Dispatch armed police to location

I think the latter version is likely what already took place in this incident, and it was actually a human that also mistook a bag of Doritos for a gun. But that version of the story is not as interesting, I guess.

shaky-carrousel|4 months ago

He could have been easily murdered. It's not the first time by a far margin that a bunch of overzealous cops murder a kid. I would never ever in my life set foot in a place that sends me armed cops so easily. That school is extremely dangerous.

ggreer|4 months ago

I think the reason the school bought this silly software is because it's a dangerous school, and they're grasping at straws to try and fix the problem. The day after this false positive, a student was robbed.[1] Last month, a softball coach was charged with rape and possession of child pornography.[2] Last summer, one student was stabbed while getting off the bus.[3] Last year, there were two incidents where classmates stabbed each other.[4][5]

1. https://www.nottinghammd.com/2025/10/22/student-robbed-outsi...

2. https://www.si.com/high-school/maryland/baltimore-county-hig...

3. https://www.wbaltv.com/article/knife-assault-rossville-juven...

4. https://www.wbal.com/stabbing-incident-near-kenwood-high-sch...

5. https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/teen-injured-after-re...

Havoc|4 months ago

>the system “functioned as intended,”

Behold - a real life example of a "Not a hotdog" system, except this one is gun / not-a-gun.

Except the fictional one from the series was more accurate...

macintux|4 months ago

I think the most amazing part is that the school doubled down on the mistake by parroting the corporate line.

I expect a school to be smart enough to say “Yes, this is a terrible situation, and we’re taking a closer look at the risks involved here.”

JKCalhoun|4 months ago

Lawyer's advice?

lisbbb|4 months ago

Except they never say that.

throw7|4 months ago

If false positives are known to happen, then you design a system where the image is vetted before telling the cops the perpetrator is armed. The company is basically swatting, but I'm sure they'll never be held liable.

lisbbb|4 months ago

Actually, if a system has too many false positives or false negatives, it's basically useless. There will eventually be doubts amongst the operators of it and the whole thing will implode, which is the best possible outcome.

We already went through this years ago with all those terrorism databases and we (humanity) have learned nothing--any database will have a percentage of erroneous data, it is impossible to eliminate erroneous data completely. Therefore, any database used to identify <fill in the blank> will have erroneous conclusions. It's been observed over and over again and governments can't help themselves that "this time it will be different because <fill in the blank> e.g. AI.

ben_w|4 months ago

Memories of Jean Charles de Menezes come to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Men...

Gibbon1|4 months ago

That was my first thought as well. A worry is police officers make mistakes which leads to anywhere from hapless people getting terrorized, harmed or killed. The bad thing about AI is it'll allow police to escape responsibility. Perhaps also where a human will realize it made a mistake they can admit it and everything is okay. But if AI says you had a gun, it won't walk that back. AI said he had a gun. But when we checked, he didn't have it anymore.

In the Menezes case the cops were playing a game of telephone that ended up with him being shot in the head.

AuthAuth|4 months ago

What is happening in the world. There should be some liability for this but nothing will happen.

SoftTalker|4 months ago

Not sure nothing will happen. Some trial lawyers would love to sue a city, a school system, and an AI surveillance company over "trauma, anxiety, and mental pain and suffering" caused by the incident. There will probably be a settlement that nobody ever hears about.

tamimio|4 months ago

Law enforcement officers, judicial officials, social workers, and similar generally maintain qualified immunity from liability in the course of their work. This case for example in which judges and social workers allegedly failed to properly assess a mother's fitness for child custody despite repeated indicators suggesting otherwise. The child was ultimately placed in the mother's care, and later was killed in an execution style (not due to negligence).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzybp0G1hFE

StopDisinfo910|4 months ago

The world is doing fairly ok, thank you. The US however I’m not so sure as people here are apparently more concerned by the AI malfunction than with the idea it’s somehow sensible to live monitor high schools for gun threat.

mns|4 months ago

A bunch of companies and people invested unimaginable amounts of money in these technologies in the hope they will multiply that money. They will showe it down our throats no matter what, this isn't about security and making the world a better place, saving lives or preventing bad things to happen, this is strictly about those people and companies making as much money as possible, or at least for now not losing the money they invested.

fritzo|4 months ago

> “They didn’t apologize. They just told me it was protocol. I was expecting at least somebody to talk to me about it.”

I wonder how effective an apology and explanation would have been? Just some respect.

chasd00|4 months ago

The school admin has no understanding of the tech and only the dimmest comprehension of what happened. Asking them to do anything besides what the tech company told them to do is asking wayyy too much.

cool_man_bob|4 months ago

Effective at what? No one is facing any consequences anyway.

prmoustache|4 months ago

We blame AI here but what's up with law enforcment that comes with loaded guns in hand and send someone to the ground and cuff him before actually doing any check?

That is the real issue.

Police force anywhere else in the world that know how to behave would have approched the student, have had a small chat with him, found out all he had in hands was a bag of doritos, maybe would have asked politely to see the content of his bag, explaining the search has been triggered by an autodetection system that may lead to occasional errors and wished him a good day.

lloda|4 months ago

Or they'd have looked at whatever images the system had used for its decision and see it was a false positive without having to send anyone over.

balls187|4 months ago

>That is the real issue.

No. Trusting AI is clearly the issue.

If there was a 9-1-1 call to the police that there was an active shooter at your kids school, how would you want the police to show up?

jmcgough|4 months ago

The guidance counselor does not have the training or time to "fix" the trauma you just gave this kid and his friends. Insane to put minors through this.

kayge|4 months ago

I wonder if the AI correctly identified it as a bag of Doritos, but was also trained on the commercial[0] where the bag appears to beat up a human (his fault for holding on too tight) and then it destroys an alien spacecraft.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIAnQwiCpRc

perplex3d|4 months ago

An alert by one of these AI tools, which from what I understand have a terrible track record, should not be reasonable suspicion or probable cause to swarm a teenager with guns drawn. I wish more people in local communities would understand how much harm this type of surveillance and response causes. Our communities should not be using these tools.

jmyeet|4 months ago

There are two basic ways AI can be used:

1. To enhance human productivity; or

2. To replace humans.

Companies, particularly in the US, very much want to go with (2) and part of the reason they can is because there are zero consequences for incidents like this.

A couple ofexamples spring to mind:

1. the UK Royal Mail scandal where a bad system accused postmasters of theft, some of whom committed suicide over the allegations. Those allegations were later proven false and it was the system's fault. IMHO the people who signed off and deployed this should be charged with negligent homicide; and

2. The Hertz case where people who had returned cars were erroneously flagged as car thieves and report was made to police. This created hell for people who would often end up with warrants they had no idea about and would be detained on random traffic stops over a car that was never stolen.

Now these aren't AI but just like the Doritos case here, the principle is the same: companies are trying to replace people with computers. In all cases, a human should be responsible for reviewing any such complaint. In the Hertz case, a human should check to see if the car is actually stolen.

In the Royal Mail situation, the system needs to show its work. Deployment should be against the existing accounting system and discrepancies between the two need to be investigated for bugs until the system is proven correct. Particularly in the early stages, a forensic accountant (if necessary) should verify that funds were actually stolen before filing a criminal complaint.

And if "false positive" criminal complaints are filed, the people who allowed that to happen, if negligent (and we all know they are), should themslves be criminally charged.

We are way too tolerant of black box systems that can result in significant harm or even death to people. Show your work. And make a human put their name and reputation to any output of such systems.

anal_reactor|4 months ago

The core of the issue is that many Americans do carry weapons which means that whatever the security system, it needs to keep in mind that the suspect might be armed and about to start shooting. This makes the police biased towards escalation because the only way against a shooter is to shoot first.

This problem doesn't exist in Europe or Japan because guns aren't that ubiquitous, which means that the police have the time to think before they act, which makes them less likely to escalate and start shooting. Obviously, for Americans, the only solution is to get rid of the gun culture, but this will never happen, so suck it up that AI gets you swatted.

Ylpertnodi|4 months ago

You had me up until the last sentence...

>Obviously, for Americans, the only solution is to get rid of the gun culture, but this will never happen, so suck it up that AI gets you swatted.

...and you are correct.

kelnos|4 months ago

I don't have kids yet, but I may someday. I went to public school myself, and would prefer to send any kid of mine to public school as well. (I'm not hard against private schools, but I'd prefer my kid gets to make friends from all walks of life, not just people who have parents who can afford private school.)

But I really wouldn't want to send my kid to a school that surveils students all the time, and uses garbage software like this that directly puts kids into dangerous situations. I feel like with a private school, I'd have more choice and ability to influence that sort of thing.

tiagod|4 months ago

The regular types of school shootings weren't enough, so they invented AI-powered police school shootings to the mix.

doublerabbit|4 months ago

Up next: gun kitted drones patrolling the school playground.

phkahler|4 months ago

>> Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,” saying its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.”

No. If you're investigating someone and have existing reason to believe they are armed then this kind of false positive might be prioritizing safety. But in a general surveillance of a public place, IMHO you need to prioritize accuracy since false positives are very bad. This kid was one itchy trigger-pull away from death over nothing - that's not erring on the side of safety. You don't have to catch every criminal by putting everyone under a microscope, you should be catching the blatantly obvious ones at scale though.

blueflow|4 months ago

The perceived threat of government forces assaulting and potentially killing me for reasons i have no control over, this is the kind of stuff that terminates the social contract. I'd want a new state that protects me from such stuff.

jharrison11|4 months ago

Looks like per their website it did function as intended... It surfaces potential threats for the school to look at and make a human decision. The principal decided to send the police after the school safety team dismissed it as part of the correct process. I mean fire alarms go off for lots of things that are not fire alarms... This was an alert meant to be validated by a human that messed up.

Its pretty clearly documented how it works here:

https://www.omnilert.com/solutions/gun-detection-system https://www.omnilert.com/solutions/ai-gun-detection https://www.omnilert.com/solutions/professional-monitoring

ignormies|4 months ago

> Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,” saying its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.”

This exact scenario is discussed in [1]. The "human in the loop" failed, but we're supposed to blame the human, not the AI (or the way it was implemented). The humans serve as "moral crumple zones".

""" The emphasis on human oversight as a protective mechanism allows governments and vendors to have it both ways: they can promote an algorithm by proclaiming how its capabilities exceed those of humans, while simultaneously defending the algorithm and those responsible for it from scrutiny by pointing to the security (supposedly) provided by human oversight. """

[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/

kelnos|4 months ago

The article doesn't confirm that there was definitely a human in the loop, but it sorta suggests that police got a chance to manually verify the photo before going out to harass this poor kid.

I suspect, though, that the AI flagging that image heavily influenced the cop doing the manual review. Without the AI, I'd expect that a cop manually watching a surveillance feed would have found nothing out of the ordinary, and this wouldn't have happened.

So I agree that it's weird to just blame the human in the loop here. Certainly they share blame, but the fact of an AI model flagging this sort of thing (and doing an objectively terrible job of it) in the first place should take most of the blame here.

ncr100|4 months ago

Sincere, and snarky summary:

"Omnilert" .. "You Have 10 Seconds To Comply"

-now targeting Black children!

Q: What was the name of the Google AI Ethicist who was fired by Google for raising the concern that AI overwhelmingly negatively framed non-white humans as threats .. Timnit Gebru

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Exit_from_Google

We, as technologists, ARE NOT DOING BETTER. We must do better, and we are not on the "DOING BETTER" trajectory.

We talk about these "incidents" with breathless, "Wwwwellll if we just train our AI better ..." and the tragedies keep rolling.

Q2: Which of you has had a half dozen Squad Cars with Armed Police roll up on you, and treat you like you were a School Shooter? Not me, and I may reasonably assume it's because I am white, however I do eat Doritos.

crazygringo|4 months ago

It sounds like the police mistook it as well:

> “They showed me the picture, said that looks like a gun, I said, ‘no, it’s chips.’”

So AI did the initial detection, but police looked at it and agreed. We don't see the image, but it probably did look like a gun because of a weird shadow or something.

Fundamentally, this isn't really any different from a person seeing someone with what looks like a gun and calling the cops, only it turns out the person didn't see it clearly.

The main issue is just that with increased numbers of images, there will be an increase in false positives. Can this be fixed by including multiple images, e.g. from motion of the object, so police (and the AI) can better eliminate false positives before traumatizing some poor teen?

Mawr|4 months ago

Picture? Images? But those are just frames of footage the cameras have captured! Why would one purposefully use less information to make a decision rather than more?

Just put the full footage in front of an unbiased third party for a multi-stage verification first. The problem space isn't "is that weird shadow in the picture a gun or not?" it's "does the kid in the video have a gun?". It's not hard to figure out the difference between a bag of chips and a gun based on body language. Presumably the kid ate chips out of the bag? Using certain motions that one makes when doing that? Presumably the kids around him all saw the object in his hands and somehow did not react as if it was a gun? Jeez.

kelnos|4 months ago

> So AI did the initial detection, but police looked at it and agreed. We don't see the image, but it probably did look like a gun because of a weird shadow or something.

Not sure I agree. The AI flagging it certainly biased the person doing the manual review toward agreeing with the AI's assessment. I can imagine a scenario where there was no AI involved, just a human watching that same surveillance feed, and (correctly) not seeing anything alarming in it.

Also I expect the AI completely failed at context. I wouldn't be surprised if the full video feed, a few minutes (or even seconds) before the flagged frame, shows the kid crumpling up the empty Doritos bag and stuffing it in his pocket. The AI probably doesn't keep all that context around to use when making a later decision, and giving just the flagged frame of video to the human may have caused them to miss out on important context.

beloch|4 months ago

Systems like this need to report confidence in their assertions.

e.g. Not "this student has a gun" but "this model says the student has a gun with a probability of 60%".

If an AI can't quantify it's degree of confidence, it shouldn't be used for this sort of thing.

xp84|4 months ago

Even better, share the frame(s) that the guess was drawn from with a human for verification before triggering ANYTHING. How much trouble could that possibly be? How many "guns" is this thing detecting in a day across all sites? I doubt more than a couple or we'd have heard about tons of incidents, false positives or not.

I wanna see the frames too.

tecoholic|4 months ago

Doesn’t work. Competition will make them report higher accuracy to make the product look better.

neverkn0wsb357|4 months ago

It’s unsurprising, since this kind of classification is only as good as the training data.

And police do this kind of stuff all the time (or in the very least you hear about it a lot if you grew up in a major city).

So if you’re gonna automate broken systems, you’re going to see a lot more of the same.

I’m not sure what the answer is but I definitely feel that “security” system like this that are purchased and rolled out need to be highly regulated and be coupled with extreme accountability and consequences for false positives.

jMyles|4 months ago

Everything around us: political tumult and weaponization of the justice system, ICE and other capricious projections of federal authority, the failure of drug prohibition, and on and on and on, points to a very simple solution:

Abolish SWAT teams. Do away with the idea that the state employees can be permitted to be more armed than anyone else.

Blaming the so-called 'swatter' (whether it's a human or AI) is really not getting at the root of the problem.

chvid|4 months ago

How likely is it that the AI system would have classified the bag of Doritos as a weapon had the person carrying it been white instead of black?

hsbauauvhabzb|4 months ago

I would be certainly curious to test ethnicity with this system. Will white students with a bag of Doritos be flagged, or only if they’re black?

12_throw_away|4 months ago

Exactly. I wonder if this a purpose-built image-recognition system, or is it a lowest-possible effort generic image model trained on the internet? Classifying a Black high school student holding Doritos as an imminent shooting threat certainly suggests the latter.

more_corn|4 months ago

Wait… AI hallucinated and the police overreacted to a black kid who actually posed no threat?

I thought those two things were impossible?

teeray|4 months ago

> “They showed me the picture, said that looks like a gun, I said, ‘no, it’s chips.’”

"Sorry, that's Nacho gun"

tomxor|4 months ago

Armed and dangerous until proven chips.

lunias|4 months ago

"I am invoking my 4th and 5th amendment rights afforded to me by the Constitution of the United States of America. I have no further comment until I have consulted with and am in the presence of my legal council."

Then, just sit back and enjoy as the lawsuit unfolds.

uda|4 months ago

When people wonder how can AI mistake a bag of snacks as a weapon, simply answer "42"

It is about the question, the answer will become very clear once you understand what was the question presented to the inference model, and of course what data and context was fed

aussieguy1234|4 months ago

Inflicting trauma on a harmless human in the name of the "safety of others" is never ok. The victim here was not unharmed, but is likely to end up with PTSD and all the mental health issues that come with it.

I hope they sue the police department over this.

j45|4 months ago

Sad for the student.

Imagine the head scratching that's going on with execs who are surprised things might work when a probabilistic software is being used for deterministic purposes without realizing there's a gap between it kind of by nature.

doublerabbit|4 months ago

> Imagine the head scratching that's going on with execs

I can't. The execs won't care and probably in their sadist ways, cheer.

kelnos|4 months ago

I'm sure there will be no head scratching. They already know that this can happen, and don't care, because they know that if someone gets killed because of it, they won't be held responsible. And may not even lose any customers.

ratelimitsteve|4 months ago

the best part of the technocracy is that they're not actually all that good at anything. the second best part is that when their mistakes end in someone dead there will be some way that they're not responsible.

kirykl|4 months ago

Wouldn’t have thought AI assessment of security image is enough for probable cause

1970-01-01|4 months ago

Very ripe for a lawsuit. I would expect lawyers to be calling daily.

zkmon|4 months ago

At least there is a check done by humans in a human way. What if this human check is removed in future, as AI decisions would be deemed no longer requiring a human inspection?

Ylpertnodi|4 months ago

Isn't that what happened here?

idontwantthis|4 months ago

If these AI video based gun detectors are not a massive fraud I will eat one.

How on Earth does a person walk with a concealed gun? What does a woman in a skirt with one taped to her thigh walk like? What does a man in a bulky sweatshirt with a pistol on his back walk like? What does a teenager in wide legged cargo jeans with two pistols and a extra magazines walk like?

walkabout|4 months ago

The whole idea even accepting the core premise is OK to begin with needs to have a similar analysis applied to it that medical tests do: will there be enough false positives, with enough harm caused by them, that this is actually worse than doing nothing? Compared with likelihood of improving an outcome and how bad a failure to intervene is on average, of course.

Given that there's no relevant screening step here and it's just being applied to everyone who happens to be at a place it's truly incredible that such an analysis would shake out in favor of this tech. The false positive rate would have to be vanishingly tiny, and it's simply not plausible that's true. And that would have to be coupled with a pretty low false negative rate, or you'd need an even lower false positive rate to make up for how little good it's doing even when it's not false-positiving.

So I'm sure that analysis was either deliberately never performed, or was and then was ignored and not publicized. So, yes, it's a fraud.

(There's also the fact that as soon as these are known to be present, they'll have little or no effect on the very worst events involving firearms at schools—shooters would just avoid any scheme that involved loitering around with a firearm where the cameras can see them, and count on starting things very soon after arriving—like, once you factor in second order effects, too, there's just no hope for these standing up to real scrutiny)

15155|4 months ago

The real issue is that they obviously can't detect what's in a backpack or similar large vessel.

Gait analysis is really good these days, but normal, small objects in a bag don't impact your gait.

gdulli|4 months ago

The only way we could have foreseen this was immediately.

programjames|4 months ago

The model seems pretty shitty. Does it only look on a frame-by-frame basis? Literally one second of video context and it would never make that mistake.

iamleppert|4 months ago

If I was that kid I'd be suing the school, the AI company, the police, anyone and everyone who had to be subjected to the mistake.

uvaursi|4 months ago

I can understand the outrage in this thread but literally none of what you are all calling for will be done. No one from justice or law reads HN to see what should be done. I wish folks here would keep a cooler head rather than posting lengthy rants and vents that call for punishing school staff. Really unprofessional and immature from a community that prides itself, to fall constantly into a cycle of vitriol.

Can someone outline a more pragmatic, if not likely, course of what happens next after this? Is it swept under the rug and we move on?

leptons|4 months ago

This is only the beginning of AI-hallucinated policing. Not a good start, and I don't think it's going to end well for citizens.

4ndrewl|4 months ago

"end well for citizens."

That ship has long sailed buddy.

lawiejtrlj|4 months ago

This is Brazil-level insanity, but half the people on this forum hope to make money off it so it's fine

rs186|4 months ago

* AI mistakenly reports the student as a threat

* the student was black

Is that really a coincidence?

It's just a matter of time before this or something worse happens.

hshdhdhehd|4 months ago

The solution is easy. Gun control. We dont feel the need to have AI surveillance on people to detect guns in ROTW.

dpk84|4 months ago

Was this really an AI gun detection system, or just a machine that goes off randomly?

mchannon|4 months ago

In 1987, Paul Verhoeven predicted exactly this in the original Robocop.

ED-209 mistakenly viewed a young man as armed, blows him away in the corporate boardroom.

The article even included an homage to:

“Dick, I’m very disappointed in you.”

“It’s just a small glitch.”

SanjayMehta|4 months ago

Robocop.

Edit: And racism. Just watched the video.

BeetleB|4 months ago

The "AI mistake" part is a red herring.

The real question is: Would this have happened in an upper/middle class school.

The student has dark skin. And is attending a school in a crime ridden neighborhood.

Were it a white student in a low crime neighborhood, would they have approached him with guns drawn?

The AI failure is masking the real problem - bad police behavior.

ninalanyon|4 months ago

Durely a human being should review the evidence before going off half cocked.

gnarlouse|4 months ago

And so begins the ending of the "unfinished fable of the sparrows"

sans_souse|4 months ago

I thought on first glance the source was from doritos.com

That would have been bold

burnt-resistor|4 months ago

It wasn't sour cream and onion and didn't contain cash, so it's super sus.

But really this is typical of cop overreaction with escalation and ego rather than calm, legal, and reasonable investigation. Karens may SWAT people they don't like, but it's police officers who must use reasonableness and restraint to defend the vestiges of their impartiality and community confidence based on asking questions and gathering evidence in a legal and appropriate manner rather than rushing to conclusions. Case in point: The NYC rough false arrest of a father in front of his kid to retrieve his mis-delivered package where the egomaniacal bully cop aggressively lectures a guy for his own mistake to cover his own ego while blaming the victim: https://youtu.be/LXd-4HueHYE

nullbyte808|4 months ago

I would get my GED at that point. Screw that school.

vezycash|4 months ago

With high level of hallucination, cops need to tranquilizers more. If the student had reached for his bag just before the cops arrived, BLM 2.0 would have started.

satisfice|4 months ago

T0 be fair most commercials for Doritos, Skittles, Mentos, etc., if occurring in real life, would result in a strong police response just after they cut away.

metalman|4 months ago

AI is a false (political) wish, it can and never work, it is the desperation of an over extended power structure to hold on and permanently consolodate controll of all of the worlds population, and nothing else.

the proofs are there.

philosophers mulled this over long ago and made clear statements as to why ai cant work

though not that for a second do I misdunderstand that it is "all in" for ai, and we all get to go for the 100 trillion dollar ride to hell.

can we have truely awsome automation for manufacturing and mundane beurocratic tasks?, fuck ya we can!

but anything that requires understanding, is forever out of reach, which unfortunatly is also lacking in the people pushing, this thing, now

thescriptkiddie|4 months ago

we need personal liability for the owners of companies that make things like this

whycome|4 months ago

Can someone write the novel

“Computer says die”

johnnyApplePRNG|4 months ago

Who knew eating Doritos could make you a millionaire?

I hope this kid gets what he deserves.

What a tragedy. I'm sure racial profiling on behalf of the AI and the police had absolutely nothing to do with it.

blindriver|4 months ago

How is this not slander? I would absolutely sue the fuck out of this system where it puts people's lives in danger.

kelnos|4 months ago

> How is this not slander?

Because that's not what slander is.

adxl|4 months ago

Hallucinate much?

twoquestions|4 months ago

Before I clicked the article, I said to myself "The victim's gotta be Black", and lo and behold. AI has inherited police's (shitty, racist, and dangerous) idea that any Black person is a dangerous monster for whom anything is a weapon.

adam12|4 months ago

This is what we get instead of reasonable gun control laws.

15155|4 months ago

You're free to (attempt to) amend the Second Amendment, but the Supreme Court of the United States has already affirmed and reaffirmed that individual ownership of firearms in common use is a right.

What do you propose that is "reasonable" given the frameworks established by Heller, McDonald, Caetano, and Bruen?

I can 3D print or mill basically every item you can imagine prohibiting at home: what exactly do laws do in this case?

nickdothutton|4 months ago

"Omnilert Gun Detect delivers instant gun detection, near-zero false positives".

dgacmu|4 months ago

If it's taking images every 30 seconds, it's getting 86400 x 30 = 2.5 million images per day per camera. So when it causes enormous, unnecessary trauma to one student per week, the company can rightfully claim it has less than a 1 in 10 million false positive rate.

(* see also "how to lie with statistics").

scotty79|4 months ago

I was unduly surprised and disappointed when I saw the photo of the kid and he turned out to be black. I would love to believe that this had no impact on how the whole thing played out, but I don't.

bobbyprograms|4 months ago

All right they’ve gotta have a plain clothes bro go up there make sure the kid is chill. You know the difference between a murder and not can be as little as somebody being nice

pickleglitch|4 months ago

Sounds like this high school is doing a great job preparing students for the real world, where they can be swarmed by jackbooted thugs at any moment for any reason.

G_o_D|4 months ago

its not gun detection that ai is racist just like its white creators

balls187|4 months ago

> “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,”

Fuck you.

duxup|4 months ago

>Omnilert later admitted the incident was a “false positive” but claimed the system “functioned as intended,” saying its purpose is to “prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.”

It's ok everyone, you're safer now that police are pointing a gun at you, because of a bag of chips ... just to be safe.

/s

Absolutely ridiculous. We're living "computer said you did it, prove otherwise, at gunpoint".

walkabout|4 months ago

We got our cyberpunk future, except none of it's cool and everything's extremely stupid.

stockresearcher|4 months ago

The safest thing to do is to pull all Frito Lay products off shelves until the packaging can be redesigned to ensure that AI never confuses them for guns. It's a liability issue. THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

6stringmerc|4 months ago

Feed the same system an image of an Asian kid and it will think the bag of chips is a calculator /s

Or am I kidding? AI is only as good as its training and humans are...not bastions of integrity...

kelnos|4 months ago

I think it's almost guaranteed that this model has race-related biases, so no, I don't think you're kidding at all. I think it's entirely likely that an Asian (or white) kid of the same build, wearing the same clothes, with a crumpled-up bag of Doritos in his pocket, would not get flagged as having a gun.

AndrewKemendo|4 months ago

Using humans for training gurantees bad outcomes because humans cannot demonstrate sociality at the same scale as antisociality.

einrealist|4 months ago

Let's hope that, thanks to AI, the young man will now have a healthier diet! /s

malux85|4 months ago

Poor kid, and what an incompetent police department not to use their own judgement ……

But ……

Doritos should definitely use this as an advertisement, Doritos - The only weapon of mass deliciousness, or something like that

And of course pay the kid, so something positive came come out of the experience for him

sebastiennight|4 months ago

The snack you'll only SWAT from my cold dead hands

rkomorn|4 months ago

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