A School Locked Down After AI Flagged a Gun. It Was a Clarinet
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A school lockdown was triggered by an AI-powered gun detection system that mistakenly identified a clarinet as a firearm, sparking a lively debate about the tech's reliability. Commenters poked fun at the false alarm, joking about other musical instruments being misidentified, with one wit suggesting that the AI company behind the tech needs to "face the music." The discussion also touched on the issue of liability, with one commenter pointing out that the AI company's ToS clearly stated it was in beta, potentially absolving them of responsibility. As the jokes and jabs continued, the thread revealed a consensus that the AI system needs significant improvement before it's ready for real-world deployment.
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With a hundred and ten cornets right behind
The AI thought about it long and hard
calling up the national guard
Cause of the horns of ev'ry shape and kind.
---
There were copper bottom tympani in horse platoons
Thundering, thundering all along the way.
Double bell euphoniums and big bassoons,
And Swarming SWAT Teams Goons so they say
---
There were cross fires and blown tires
And reporters from the local news
Clarinets of ev'ry size
And trumpeters who'd improvise
And video games that went pew-pew!
----
on multiple edits: tried to find a layout that fit the song
Why are there cameras in schools? Why are they looking for guns? Why are they using AI to do it?
Could this not all be avoided by not letting kids have guns or am i missing the point?
I hate camera proliferation but, judging by the YouTube plenty of bodycam footage, it does work.
You won't likely find the numbers you want because the very nature of the problem is that cameras make visible something that wasn't.
It should be legally required for daycares to have cameras. Those kids cannot communicate, so there is zero accountability there. And this only becomes a thing because it’s so incredibly cheap to add the accountability.
Obviously, in before times, when it was too expensive, a cost benefit decision has to be made to go with trust only. But now that the cost is trivial, that cost benefit decision has to be revisited.
If not even the children can play any more however they want, for fear that automated surveillance would identify them as "pretending to have a weapon", which can result in punishment, I believe that such a society has serious problems for which it certainly did not find the right solution.
I have not said anything about the police.
I have quoted directly from the article exactly what the school management said.
The Columbine shooting was captured on one in April 1999. That's not really new or controversial ... but why are they not closed circuit and in fact feeding the stream through an LLM and probably worse? Fair question to ask.
Kids are already not allowed to have guns.
Edit: I don't know about these specific lines, but this script was co-written by the great and recently deceased Tom Stoppard
Unless it's completely clear that it's not a gun, the reviewer is essentially always going to pull the alarm. The risk of a false alarm is going to be seen as minimal, while the risk of a false negative is catastrophic.
False alarm makes the news for now because it's novel, we all go "What the hell, guys?" and life goes on.
Nobody wants to end up sitting in front of a prosecutor, the media, etc explaining why they chose not to pull the alarm, when the AI _clearly_ identified the gun, and instead chose to let all those kids die.
The only way this gets fixed is if there are consequences at every level for false positives.
In this case, the kid was holding the clarinet like a weapon, and though we have not seen the actual video, the descriptions of it make it sound like overall resolution was poor.
The alternative to the false positive here, is to not report anything that you cannot be 110% certain of, which means that you're likely to miss some true positives.
Overall this situation mostly reads like everything worked as intended, and the press turned it into more than it needed to be. School shooting are a real thing, there is plenty of evidence of that. Weapons detection has become a necessary component of a school safety strategy. For many reasons, it is not practical to have personnel at the school, or within the district, act as the first-pass reviewer of AI detections of weapons.
Do we really want consequences for false positives? If a kid is smoking a cigarette in the bathroom and the smoke detector goes off, the school should evacuate. The Smoke Alarm went off. No principal is going to sign off on the assumption that "Timmy is smoking, it's not a real fire". The principal shouldn't be punished for responding to the alarm. Timmy...probably should get reprimanded, but that feels off-metaphor.
In the example we are given, Timmy did nothing wrong. Having a clarinet is not contraband, and he should not be punished. The admin who called a lockdown did nothing wrong, as they were responding to the system in the way they were trained to use it. This is all in the name of safety, where things are done in 'an abundance of caution'.
>"It's not my fault the cops shot the kid, the system said it was a gun."
No, its the cop's fault. The cop hasn't been trained to use the AI security system, and is instead given their own SOP for assessing threats.
For every false alarm you need to pay the salaries that were wasted and the snacks and therapists for the kids.
Likewise for every missed gun hazard pay for teachers and therapists for kids.
If they aren’t confident enough to back a service that has such a mental impact on failure they should not be selling it.
ZeroEyes said that trained employees review alerts before they are sent and that its software can make a lifesaving difference in averting mass shootings by alerting law enforcement to weapons on campus within seconds. At Lawton Chiles, the student flagged by ZeroEyes was holding his musical instrument like a rifle, co-founder Sam Alaimo told The Washington Post. “We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”
'''
I'm not sure how to apply that to this situation, but it is one every school should think about when students try things.
If I think of my school time, I would believe even the fact that a bomb threat would be an annoyance to teachers would a be sufficient reason (of course, in the schools of the country where I live there were other methods than bomb threats to be an annoyance to teachers).
Solution is to make school non mandatory!
The obvious unintended consequence of this is that then nobody learns how to read (because who wants to go to school?) and then our economy crumbles and everyone is stupid and then everyone dies.
Or maybe some kids do go to school, so they become the global elite while the other 98% are illiterate and they flee the country because obviously and so the economy still crumbles and everyone dies.
See, these are the things we need to be thinking about.
The military moved away from using urban armories. These became repurposed as sports halls, places for events, and so on. For examples, https://fightingillini.com/facilities/ui-armory/5 and https://www.wakefieldma.gov/Facilities/Facility/Details/Dril...
If the technology is even somewhat capable of detecting actual guns, it will probably save far more lives in the long run.
So not even the most conservative justices buy into the idea that Americans have a right to bear arms everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation_Catholic_Church_s...
/s
A man saw a snappy two-sentence title. He was mildly annoyed.
In big journalism organizations like this one, the writers don't come up with the headlines. There are other people for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Harry_Stanley
On 22 September 1999, Stanley was returning home from the Alexandra Pub in South Hackney carrying, in a plastic bag, a table leg that had been repaired by his brother earlier that day. Someone had phoned the police to report "an Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag".[2]
Awesome, they got away with unlawfully killing a man.
How much would your employer need to pay you for you to sacrifice your own safety for your job?
The last mindset I want policemen to have is to go into every situation assuming the worst because of a small chance their safety may be at risk. Which is exactly what it seems happened.
You can't just shoot someone who's holding a bag with something in it just because some random person has judged it could be a firearm.
“The officers had told the inquest that Mr. Stanley had turned around ‘in a slow, deliberate, fluid motion’ and pointed his wrapped-up table leg at PC Fagan, adopting a classic firing posture, which prompted Chief Insp. Sharman to open fire, hitting him in the head.” [1]
Yeah right, that definitely happened. An innocent man is dead because some damn pig wanted to kill someone. That is all this is.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/06/stan-j07.html
So, not much? I definitely get paid less than the average cop in my city.
There are plenty of jobs that involve sacrificing safety, but very few of them give you the opportunity to kill people because you "didn't want to give up your own safety".
But it's important to note that officers are specifically taught to be jumpy and aggressive. That's not a natural response. The reason we see so many accidental shooting is because the training around it encourages it. Accidentally shooting a few innocent people in the pursuit of stamping out crime is a necessary evil in the eyes of American police.
Ultimately, the police only really know how to shoot, and we put them in situations they're not equipped to handle. It's not shocking, then, that people end up getting shot. They truly have no business doing wellness calls, or mental health assistance, or even routine traffic stops.
While it may have been an accident, it was a negligent accident. If I accidentally killed someone with a gun I would go to prison. In addition they were found guilty by the jury. It was overturned due to political pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Harry_Stanley
AI is often awful, but I'm giving it a pass on this one.
That's... pretty much every student with any long, tubular object. Of which there are many.
I don't know about the AI's decisions, but he would have caught the eye of a casual human observer. My point is: it was a bit more involved than just a 5yo pointing his finger and shouting "POW! I got you!".
Once you can make a mistake and be okay, but you soon you become "the little boy who cried wolf", and people don't move to safety when there is a real issue!
If it's actually a mental health crisis, then how do we solve that one? Especially with what the Republicans are doing right now?
uninvited and unwanted federal troops are roaming around cities against the wishes of state governors
- They have knife stabbings in China. (Yes. A gun is more lethal.)
- A bad guy can still get a gun. (Yes.)
- Hand guns are more dangerous than rifles. (This means let's reduce both.)
- The gun doesn't kill people. People kill people. (This means let's reduce how many people have guns.)
- Mass shootings aren't the majority of gun deaths. (Let's reduce the total gun deaths and mass shootings then.)
Come up with as many ridiculous retorts as you like. If you had reduced the total number of guns, most of the shootings could not have happened.
The catch is, it only works with an enlightened, well educated population with philia and a sense of civic duty. Arming inner city Chicago has been a disaster.
That's tough to maintain that state, but we have to try, because if a population doesn't fit that description the country turns to shit and you won't want to live there. To disarm is to admit we can't be an enlightened country anymore and we won't try, and after that its just a matter of time until there is nothing special about America and its just another mediocre third world dump.
I just don't see what arming citizens is going to do against a militaristic government.
You need to have the population armed beforehand. Its not practical to try to dynamically adjust how armed the populace is in proportion to perceived governmental Attila-ness.
To your last point, an armed populace makes revolt feasible, and there is a spectrum here. The key is that the oligarchy will need to convince the army to stay on its side and punish the revolting populace. The more sacrifice and violence that is required, the harder it is to keep convincing them. Also, look at the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, an armed, hostile populace is just much harder to control than an unarmed one.
Are there examples in modern times of a stable society consisting of a heavily armed population such that as a result of this tyranny has been curbed? Americans are the most heavily armed population in the world and it seems that tyranny is measurably setting in right now. The stability seems like it was higher in the beginning of the 20th century too. The 60-70's and now are the most unstable periods I believe, and the number of guns has only increased. So I don't think the US would be a good example.
In good faith, I cannot see how arming civilians reduces tyranny in modern times, unless your model actually is Afghanistan and Iraq. In those cases it's not that all civilians are armed. There are armed groups. That's not a world I want to live in though, anyways.
On the flip side, I feel like the two parties see things differently: One party is mostly about prevention, while the other side is predominantly about punishment.
> If it's actually a mental health crisis,
That's the scapegoat. It's an easy scapegoat because it blames others. And others are easy to hate. They aren't us. "They" are others. Yes, mental health is an issue, but it's not so much higher than in other nations to explain the much higher rate. It's a scapegoat because it's easy to say, "Wow, no normal person would do that, so they must be crazy." That sounds reasonable if you don't think about it for a moment.
Whether you think that makes the gun situation "hopeless" depends on whether you think there are other ways to reduce violence without taking away the rights of law abiding citizens.
Do you see the problem with that sort of thinking?
The /NRA/ lobbied for some of the first gun control laws in SanFran, because the Black Panthers were open carrying. Even in the days of the 'wild west' there were plenty of towns and cities with enforced gun control ordinances.
If?
The institution you use to socialize your youth results in some attempting to murder their peers.
Even if you took away the guns so they couldn't follow-through, why are your schools fucking up child rearing so badly in the first place?
I think the solution is to make it difficult for underage kids (U21's) to access guns so easily. And maybe start fostering some healthy habits and relationships by starting with the young.
In countries with rational gun laws the owner is held fully responsible for everything their guns do, until they declare it stolen/lost. And then an inquest is held to determine if the owner was negligent in allowing the firearm to be lost/stolen in the first place. Subsequently, guns are either kept on the person of the owner (in the case of a handgun), or they are locked away in a Proper Safe (not a filing cabinet that's painted black ffs).
And of course there are policy wonks who would make gun ownership a human rights issue even though its fundamentally unsafe to have such free gun ownership.
Of course the co-founder of the company that made the error would say that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45684934 (the doritos gun)