AI error jails innocent grandmother for months in North Dakota fraud case
Source: Grand Forks Herald
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Officers from North Dakota did not pick up Lipps from her jail cell in Tennessee until Oct. 30 — 108 days after her arrest. The next day she made her first appearance in a North Dakota courtroom to fight the charges.
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Greenwood immediately asked Lipps for her bank records. Once they were in hand, Fargo police met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had already been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time police interviewed her.
Her bank records showed she was more than 1,200 miles away, at home in Tennessee at the same time police claimed she was in Fargo committing fraud.
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On Christmas Eve, five days after the interview with Fargo police, the case was dismissed, and she was released from jail.
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Read more: https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/north-dakota/ai-error-jails-innocent-grandmother-for-months-in-north-dakota-fraud-case
They kept this woman in jail for more than 5 months, based on Fargo police using faulty AI to charge her with bank fraud in a state she'd never been in.
She lost her home, her car and her dog.
They released her from jail on Christmas Eve with no money, no way to get back to Tennessee, only the summer clothing she was wearing when arrested. Defense attorneys gave her money for a hotel room and food.
IMO Fargo owes her millions, and at least some people in the Fargo police department should be fired, investigated (including the police chief responsible, who will be retiring in a couple of weeks) and maybe prosecuted. They did not try to question her while she was in Tennessee, and did not pick her up from the TN jail where she was being held for months. I wonder if they knew they had no real case against her and were hoping some proof would show up.
It was sadistic of them to release her when they did, the way they did. They've never apologized to her.
I hope national media will put them under a spotlight.
AI facial recognition isn't reliable, but that initial mistake, bad as it was, was followed by incompetence and contempt for her rights.
In Tennessee, too, since no one there even asked about this woman's bank records, which would have cleared her immediately.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Unfortunately I can't make that black box go away. It's part of the page.
Here's what the headline says:
"AI error jails innocent grandmother for months in North Dakota fraud case"
Subhead:
"Angela Lipps spent nearly six months in jail in Tennessee and North Dakota after being misidentified by Fargo police through AI facial recognition in a bank fraud investigation."
The rest of the story is given in full.
Ultimately also this travesty comes down mostly to human screw-ups. It's one thing to have the cops show up to ask you questions based on faulty AI-based facial recognition, and a whole OTHER thing to be actually arrested and then left to rot for 5 fucking months 
Which is just to say that in THIS case at least, AI's culpability is relatively low vs. the totality of harm caused. But that will not always be the case. Esp. if military autonomous killing machines run on AI 
And of course the freaking cops need to get it through their damn heads that AI makes mistakes and not rely on it so much, cause this is far from the first case of this kind of crap!!!
I admit I use AI quite a bit to confirm the accuracy of news stories and get a better understanding of events, and the absolute #1 thing AI gets wrong is overstating the certainty level about things that are inherently uncertain. Basically it tries to sound more authoritative than it should, fairly often. It will also try to tell you what it thinks you want to hear, although ChatGPT is by far and away the WORST in this regard, they all have a tendency to judge your intent.
To combat these issues, I prompt with this specifically in mind with things like "I see some recent news stories that say X and others that seem to say the opposite. Please provide a detailed assessment of the available evidence for each of the assertions and show me your work in determining which is more likely to be accurate". This way it doesn't "think" for lack of a better word, I want a definitive answer for the question "is x true?", nor that I have a "preferred" answer. Give it permission to be non-authoritative and unbiased, tell it you just want to see the evidence/arguments on both sides, and it will do better things.
It may still not find (and hence consider) evidence that you'd hope it would, however. There's limits to the scope of searches it will do so that's good to keep in mind as well.
Bottom-line, this all makes it pretty damn sketchy to use for decisions that can really impact people's lives
