One day in 2020, police arrested Robert Williams in his Detroit driveway, handcuffed him in front of his children, and took him away.That night he slept on a cold cell floor using his jacket for a pillow. His wife called the Detroit detention centre repeatedly, but got no answers.— why police mistakenly thought he was the criminal — only surfaced later, after a lot of digging.
A board game contest between human and machine in 2016 marked the birth of modern AI. This is the moment the world changed forever.For police, the benefits were obvious. Facial recognition could analyse a blown-up still taken from a security tape, sift through a database of millions of driver licence photos, and identify the person who did the crime.Apart from facilitating a system of mass surveillance that threatened people's privacy, the new AI systems were racially biased.
For facial recognition, the AI maps a face's distinctive features , and then converts the image data into a string of numbers, or "faceprint", that corresponds to the colour and tone of these features.It then runs this unique code through its database of other images to see if there's a close-enough match.If it's mostly trained on one kind of face, it's significantly worse at accurately matching other kinds of faces.
This study included algorithms used in the facial recognition system that picked out Robert Williams' licence photo. His mug shot, fingerprints and DNA were still on file, and he needed a lawyer to defend against the theft charge.But Mr Williams wasn't done. He then campaigned for Detroit police to stop using facial recognition. When they refused, he sued them for wrongful arrest. This case is ongoing."It's a majority black city, and here it is investing millions of dollars of taxpayer money in using a technology that is particularly unreliable in identifying black faces.
That didn't stop the then government from ploughing ahead with its planned national facial recognition system, says Edward Santow, an expert on responsible AI at the University of Technology Sydney, and the Australian Human Rights Commissioner at the time.