Lawton Chiles Middle School in Oviedo went into lockdown Tuesday.
Its AI weapons detection system detected a student holding a clarinet in a similar manner as someone might hold a rifle. It “triggered the Code Red to activate,” the school’s principal told families in an automated message.
I see your point, but the concerning bit about the tech being used in cases like this is that it helps pave the way for more mass surveillance. Plus there’s the fact that just because it has a high rate of false positives doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll have a low rate of false negatives (i.e. whether it’s actually effective).
The caveat you mention near the end of your first paragraph is key here: “if and when it helps”. So many of these systems have not been proven to work (or indeed, have been proven to not work, in some cases), and are exorbitantly expensive. Given that AI has been pushed into so many domains where it is not wanted or helpful, I am not particularly hopeful about this particular case, even though we only have very limited info from this false positive. The whole mess is complicated by the fact that it’s exceptionally hard to prove or disprove whether these systems work because the vast vast majority of them are black box systems, surrounded by even more opaque financial fuckery. To me, this definitely fits the spirit of the community