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.

Those are a lot of "presumablies". Maybe you're right. Or maybe it was mostly obscured so you really couldn't tell. How do you know it was open and he was eating? How do you know there were other kids around and he wasn't solo? Why do you think the body language would be so different? Nobody is claiming he was using a gun or threatening anyone with it. If you're just carrying something in your hand, I don't know how you could tell what the object is or isn't from body language.

It wasn't open and he wasn't eating. The AI flagged a bulge in his pants pocket, which was the empty, crumpled up bag that he put in his pocket after finishing eating all the chips.

This is quite frankly absurd. The fact that the AI flagged it is bonkers, and the fact that a human doing manual review still believed it was a gun... I mean, just, wow. The level of dangerous incompetence here is staggering.

And I wouldn't be surprised if, minutes (or even seconds) before the video frame the AI flagged, the full video showed the kid finishing the bag and stuffing it in his pocket. AIs suck at context; a human watching the full video would not have made the same mistake. But in mostly taking the human out of the loop, all they had for verification was a single frame of video, captured as a context-free still image.

It is frankly mind-boggling that you or anyone else can defend this crap.

> The AI flagged a bulge in his pants pocket

It's not totally clear -- we haven't seen the picture. The point is, it seemed to look like a gun. Shadows and reflections do funny things. For you to say with such confidence that this is absurd and bonkers, is itself absurd without us seeing the image(s) in question.

> It is frankly mind-boggling that you or anyone else can defend this crap.

That's not appropriate. Please see HN guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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