AI weapon detection system at Antioch High School failed to detect gun in Nashville shooting | A district official said the system failed to detect the shooter’s handgun because of where cameras were in the school.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ai-weapon-detection-system-antioch-high-school-failed-detect-gun-nashv-rcna189025
11 Comments
From the article: An artificial intelligence-powered weapon detection system failed to pick up the handgun a 17-year-old Nashville, Tennessee, student used in a school shooting Wednesday that killed a 16-year-old girl, officials said.
The software, called Omnilert, failed to detect the gun because of where cameras were in Antioch High School, Metro Nashville Public Schools spokesperson Sean Braisted said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
But the system was activated by police brandishing their weapons during the response to the shooting, Braisted said.
Omnilert connects to the school’s existing network of cameras and uses AI technology to detect weapons, he said, but “in this instance, based on the shooter’s location in proximity to the cameras, it wasn’t close enough to get an accurate read and to activate that alarm.”
“The location of the shooter and the firearm meant that the weapon was not visible,” said Omnilert CEO Dave Fraser in an email. “This is not a case of the firearm not being recognized by the system.”
Metro Nashville Public Schools Director Adrienne Battle said, “There is not one system that is 100% going to capture everything that a person may have on them.”
So, does this technology only identify a gun when it’s out in the open? Seems like that doesn’t really help much, as after it gets pulled, it’s going to be used long before police arrive. Sounds like good old American capitalism. Spend on defense, and then spend some more!
what the fuck is an AI weapon detection system anyway? how does that offer benefits over a metal detector?
Sheesh.
I’m working on an AI project and I met a consultant in Nashville who hinted at his involvement in an AI project for recognizing guns in school. We talked for about 30 minutes before recognizing that the guy had zero understanding of what the AI landscape looked like. He insinuated that large language models and vision models were essentially the same thing (and for those of you who know AI well enough that you can make the case for why they *are* very similar, this man was not making that argument.)
Granted, he wasn’t a tech consultant at all, but it was concerning enough for him not to know this difference that I ended consideration of hiring him there.
It was probably only trained to detect [the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch](https://youtu.be/xOrgLj9lOwk)
If a security company sold camera based image detection to a school and said anything but, “There’s a 10% chance this will help” they’re straight up lying.
Why is Antioch seem to be a common city/town in different states where shit like this happens? There’s an Antioch in my state as well, nothing has happened there though. Just curious if anyone else noticed this
I feel like if you’ve got an AI looking for a gun at school you’ve already left it too late.
What an AI might be able to do is identify that the kid was a Nazi based on his social media posting history and maybe, just maybe, get somebody to intervene. You really don’t even need an AI for that.
Even then you have to act on this stuff. There was a Welsh youth in the UK who killed a bunch of little girls with a knife and he’d been flagged up multiple times, but the strictness of the process meant that because he hadn’t ticked all the right boxes there wasn’t an appropriate or effective intervention and three kids got killed.
Although in fairness the fact this this was a black Nazi does give people something of a right to be surprised. Like, I thought I’d seen every iteration of the American school shooter, this one definitely new.
“heY gUyz, We hAvE a pRoblEm wIth weApOnz, what do we do? Put CamErAz jeje”
Guys, you have a fucked-up country, where you expect other to fix your issues.
You have self-defeating laws, because you assume people have morals and are sane.
If the AI can see the gun then everybody around can see the gun. So, what is the purpose of the AI? An automatic alarm?