French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools

theguardian.com

18 points·ta_u··7 comments

I had the misfortune to work for Cognizant, and they're absolute bastards for proposing overly-complicated solutions. And for delivering half-baked, brittle, barely functional systems.

But they're also very, very good at getting large organisations to part with large sums of cash.

I don't see how AI really applies here - it seems to me than "machine vision" would have been much, much simpler.

Computer vision has been an "AI problem" for a long time and I don't think it's quite not one yet.

Note I put "computer vision" is quotes; what I mean is that you can get very far with relatively simple image processing techniques, without any AI involvement.

They've been doing this thing with aerial photographs for decades.

You print the latest photo on a transparency and lay it over the last one. Human eyes are really good at finding the differences.

Being taxed on the rental value of your primary residence sounds so wrong

Why? Many country do this. You need a number to value somehow the property, it is fair that a 15m2 flat pays less taxes than a private hotel of 5000m2, no? Rubbish needs to be removed, water needs to be provided and treated, police is needed to protect properties etc....

Because rental value is generally higher than that of a primary residence.

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