Lawton Chiles Middle School in Oviedo went into lockdown Tuesday.
Its AI weapons detection system detected a student holding a clarinet in a similar manner as someone might hold a rifle. It “triggered the Code Red to activate,” the school’s principal told families in an automated message.
Is this really a case of fuck AI? To anybody outside the US this paragraph reads like fucking satire. From within, where kids learn how to crouch under desks, hide behind bullet proof whiteboards or something, and lock down better than the CIA this doesn’t really move the needle, does it? The trauma is already there with all the drills and is eternal, as is the 2nd amendment. And this is one area where you would prefer a false positive over a false negative. So for me this isn’t so much fuck AI as fuck every lawmaker of the US since the civil war.
It’s fuck AI because it should already be aware that clarinets might exist in a school
I would argue that your point applies to every use case for AI. AI isn’t responsible for any of the bad shit it’s associated with, blame lies with humans 100% of the time.
Is every scenario with so-called AI in it caused by humans? Sure. That’s not really my point though. It was humans who caused the dumb situation around private gun ownership that then eventually caused school shootings to be a thing schools need to prepare for. I would tolerate the use of so-called AI here under these dumb circumstances and moreover would tolerate a false positive like this. I feel similarly positive about the use of models in medicine - if and when it helps. Or as a tool for people with disabilities. Et cetera.
Normally we lambast here very dumb applications of so-called AI. The ones that get lawyers in trouble, the ones that get forced into areas where it’s unnecessary, the ones that boil away drinking water senselessly, or that ask children for nudes, or - sadly - the ones that drive teenagers to suicide. We lambast all the peddlers of so-called AI with their dumb predictions about how their faulty products will revolutionize everything. That’s the spirit of “Fuck AI.” My point was this story is less in keeping with the spirit of “Fuck AI.” So-called AI might actually help to make a bad situation not get worse.