AI Good and Bad

bigredfish said:
LOL
A fake story about Chinese bots negatively influencing the data center controversy which is posted by a known paid right wing “influencer” trying to influence people into believing data centers are good and are just getting bad PR because if Chinese influence.

Priceless
Click to expand...


Well... seems a bit naive to dismiss what China is doing. Why do you think it's implausible that China would seek to manipulate US public sentiment and perception of data centers while they are scrambling to compete in that arena?

Toms Hardware went with it.


and a source I know you'll like...

Is China Sabotaging America's Data Centers?<!-- --> | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com www.zerohedge.com

China's Two-Front Squeeze On America's AI Build-Out<!-- --> | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com www.zerohedge.com

There are others as well.
 
I’m sure they are
 
 
  • Haha
Reactions: johnfitz
AI incorrectly steers debug/repair pro down the wrong path

BuyitFixit is a pretty good diagnostic/repair/debugging fellow on YouTube, with many, many examples of electronic repairs, both non-computer and microprocessor and others. This time, he was attempting to diagnose a boot flash RAM error in a hand-held signal generator.



1788037296220.png
 
  • Haha
Reactions: bigredfish, mat200 and wrapter
Opps .. Police use Amazon Rekognition to ID suspect, catches the wrong guy and puts him in jail for 17 months ..


Amazon Rekognition faces scrutiny in false arrest lawsuit​

Amended complaint asks whether Amazon shares responsibility after police built a case around a poor-quality facial recognition match


1788049370815.png

www.biometricupdate.com

Amazon Rekognition faces scrutiny in false arrest lawsuit | Biometric Update

Amended complaint asks whether Amazon Rekognition shares responsibility after police built a case around a poor-quality facial recognition match.
www.biometricupdate.com www.biometricupdate.com


Amazon Web Services (AWS) was added as a defendant in a federal lawsuit brought by a St. Louis, Missouri man who spent 17 months in jail after police used facial recognition on a poor quality image of a masked suspect and then built a case around the photo.

Christopher Gatlin alleges in an amended complaint filed last Thursday that his arrest and prosecution resulted from poor police work, inadequate training, misconduct and a defective facial recognition system developed by Amazon.

The new filing names AWS and identifies Amazon Rekognition as the technology involved in the identification that ultimately led police to Gatlin.

In an email to Biometric Update, AWS said its terms of service prohibit police departments from using Rekognition’s face comparison feature in criminal investigations. The company said it does not know how the St. Louis Police Department used Rekognition in this case, but would investigate any information that emerges during the litigation.

“Our terms of service prohibit the use of Rekognition’s face comparison feature by police departments in connection with criminal investigations, and we expect our customers to comply with those terms. However, police departments may use Rekognition for other permitted purposes. We do not access customer content without their agreement so we do not know exactly how the St. Louis Police Department chose to use Rekognition or whether any use case violated our terms, but we will fully investigate any additional information that comes out during the litigation,” an AWS spokesperson said.

The addition of Amazon significantly broadens this civil rights case that until now has focused largely on how St. Louis and county police used facial recognition and what they did after it identified Gatlin as a possible match.

The case began with the December 7, 2020, assault of a MetroLink security guard at the St. Charles Rock Road station in north St. Louis County. The victim suffered a traumatic brain injury and repeatedly told police he could not remember the men who attacked him, according to allegations recounted in a federal court ruling.

Detectives obtained surveillance video showing the attackers. One investigator eventually submitted an image of one of them to the St. Louis Mugshot Recognition Technology system.

The federal court record describes the image as grainy, blurry, taken from a distance and from above the suspect’s face.

A hood covered part of his forehead and a medical mask obscured another portion of his face. The system nevertheless returned possible candidates, including Gatlin. Before the facial recognition search, investigators had no information pointing to him as a suspect.

The Washington Post subsequently found that the regional St. Louis facial recognition system searched a database containing more than 250,000 mug shots, and the user manual warned that an image needed to be high quality for the system to return likely candidates.

Police took Gatlin’s photograph to the assault victim in August 2021 as part of a six-person lineup. The victim again said his memory of the attack was poor.

Body camera footage later showed that he initially leaned toward another man, then wavered between that man and Gatlin before an officer encouraged him to consider characteristics including complexion and clothing. He eventually selected Gatlin. The identification became the evidence used to pursue the charges against him.

Gatlin was arrested on August 14, 2021. Unable to pay a $75,000 cash bond, he was jailed and ultimately spent about 17 months incarcerated while the case remained pending. The criminal charges themselves continued until March 2024.

The case began unraveling after defense counsel obtained the body camera recording of the photo lineup.

At a February 2024 hearing, St. Louis County Circuit Judge Brian May suppressed the witness identification after finding that officers had departed from accepted procedures for conducting an impartial lineup. Prosecutors dismissed the charges the following month.

Gatlin sued the officers, St. Louis and St. Louis County in January 2025, alleging constitutional violations and state law claims arising from his arrest and prosecution. Earlier claims against SureScan Technology LLC, another technology company originally named in the litigation, were voluntarily dismissed.

The remaining claims have already survived an important legal challenge.

In October 2025, U.S. Magistrate Judge Abbie Crites-Leoni declined to dismiss most of the claims challenged by the city and St. Louis police officer Matthew Welle. The ruling did not establish that the defendants were liable.

At the motion to dismiss stage, the court was required to accept Gatlin’s properly pleaded factual allegations as true.

Judge Crites-Leoni concluded that Gatlin had plausibly alleged a reckless investigation and malicious prosecution, among other claims, and allowed a municipal failure to train claim over facial recognition to proceed, finding that Gatlin had sufficiently alleged that officers were given access to the technology without adequate training despite the known danger of misidentification.

The newly amended lawsuit attempts to move responsibility further upstream to Amazon.

AWS’s current documentation for Rekognition says its face-matching technology does not support images that are too blurry or grainy for a human to recognize a face, or images in which large portions of a face are obscured.

Its technical guidance recommends sharp images, visible faces and avoiding masks and other objects that block facial features.

The guidance does not establish what version of Rekognition was used in 2021 or whether the software failed in Gatlin’s case. Those questions remain central to the litigation.

But they underscore a central problem with the police record. The input image described by the court contained several of the conditions that make facial matching difficult, while police treated the resulting candidate as the starting point for an investigation that produced little independent evidence linking Gatlin to the crime.

AWS’s current law enforcement guidance says facial comparison results should be considered alongside other compelling evidence and should not be the sole basis for action affecting a person’s civil liberties.

Amazon’s service terms describe Rekognition matches as predictions about the likelihood that the same person appears in two images rather than definitive identifications. It is that distinction that has become one of the central problems in police deployment of facial recognition.

A Washington Post investigation published in January 2025 examined detailed facial recognition records from 23 police departments and found that 15 had arrested at least one AI-identified suspect without obtaining independent evidence connecting that person to the crime, frequently contrary to their own policies.

At the time, the Post had identified at least eight Americans who had been wrongfully arrested following facial recognition searches.

Gatlin’s case demonstrated another danger. Once software puts a particular face in front of investigators, subsequent investigative steps can reinforce the machine-generated lead rather than independently test it.

A suspect generated by facial recognition can be put into a photo lineup, and a witness’ selection of that person can then appear to corroborate the original algorithmic result even though the lineup itself was created because of that result.

That is essentially the chain Gatlin alleges occurred in St. Louis.

The court has already found that his allegations concerning what police did with the facial recognition result are sufficient for most of his claims to proceed. But by now also naming Amazon, the amended complaint asks whether Amazon’s facial recognition technology also bears legal responsibility for its role in a process that ultimately sent Gatlin to jail.

This report was updated August 17, 2026 at 3:02PM EST with comment from AWS.
 
  • Angry
  • Wow
Reactions: wrapter, johnfitz and bigredfish
 
  • Sad
Reactions: wrapter, johnfitz and bigredfish
 
  • Sad
Reactions: johnfitz
Seeing reports of major outages across multiple AI platforms...

Gee, I hope this doesn't happen while I'm transferring money or while being operated on by a doctor using AI

 
  • Haha
  • Wow
Reactions: mat200, johnfitz and VorlonFrog
 
  • Wow
Reactions: mat200
It’s growing

 
  • Exclamation
Reactions: mat200
Lets hope not



 
  • Haha
  • Wow
Reactions: johnfitz and mat200
China concerns about AI companions

 
  • Wow
Reactions: johnfitz
Last edited:
  • Wow
  • Exclamation
Reactions: mat200, johnfitz and wrapter
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom