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Comment by yawaworht1978 | Hacker News Reader

yawaworht1978

Well that's still a failure on both the software programmed by humans causing a false positive and then doubled down by a wrong human review, based on a false alert. All involved stakeholders have failed.

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The software didn't raise a false positive though, by my reading.

It identified it as a firework a mile away! The humans at the software company, REclassified it as a gunshot at Williams' location.

Interesting that there's no mention of the actual gun shot, which appears to have happened some time later?

Not only is this "tool" bullshit, it seems the employees of said org are morally bankrupt enough to falsify evidence in order to put an innocent man in jail.

The whole thing would be utterly unbelievable if it wasn't happening in America.

EDIT: typos

How is this a failure by software? The software categorized the sound as a fire work.

Yeah, looks like it's the actual software that's undermined the case against him. A loud bang which coincides - perhaps pretty loosely - with some footage, some supposed audio expert contractor's human employee - possibly knowing other details of the case - thinks it's consistent with a gunshot but the case collapses when records reveal the AI program they ran originally classified the loud bang as a distant firework.

> How is this a failure by software?

The outcome - a guy being charged with a crime using bogus evidence is the story. The software may have been right, but the people who operate the software didn't trust it. Regardless, the story is trying to point out we might not be ready to put our faith in AI for criminal prosecutions at this time.

If you use a hammer to drive a nail, and the nail goes in exactly as intended, but then the carpenter rips out the nail, how is that a failure of the hammer?

If shotspotter had not existed, I think this man would have still been charged with the murder. It seems beyond dispute that the victim was shot in the car of the accused. The case against him was seemingly lost for two reasons: shotspotter's fuckery, and the police not bothering to collect other evidence in a timely matter. It should not have been hard for the police to determine whether there was a gunshot fired in the car, or whether the passenger was struck by a bullet fired from outside the car. There was really no reason for shotspotter to play a role in this case, it could have been cut and dry but they went and muddled the whole thing up with their janky tech.

'The system' is software + people who run it. Their failures are combined. As an external person i dont care which part of the company fucked up, they shoupd carry responsibility

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