The injured teenage survivor of a January 2025 shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee high school recently sued the manufacturer of an “AI gun detection” system that failed to detect the handgun that left two dead, including the shooter.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Davidson County court last month, the security company Omnilert either knew or should have known that there were “significant operational limitations in its gun detection system that could result in detection failures during actual emergencies, including limitations based on camera placement, proximity of the weapon to camera sensors, camera angle, lighting, and weapon visibility.”
Omnilert cofounder Ara Bagdasarian declined Ars’ invitation to answer questions about the lawsuit. System Integrations, the other defendant in the case, which resold the Omnilert system, also did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.
I am so tired of AI being shoved into everything and then people surprised when it doesn’t work. There’s no AI I think that could have detected a small firearm easily concealed. Hell as it is with legal concealed carry you can’t tell who is legally carrying as it is even with some of the most observant eyes watching.
People (and by this I mean the company) keep think that AI can give actual answers. It can’t. It’s a non-detrrminustic system, but they want it to behave deterministically. I’m sure the engineers gave the probability stats up to the business and marketing, who then immediately lowered their pants and shit on them, and then rolled it out as the perfect amazing product
There’s no AI I think that could have detected a small firearm easily concealed.
The idea with these kinds of systems are meant to allow early warning when possible.
No system is going to be 100%.
Edit: I get the downvotes, but there are people/companies that were/are developing such systems with a genuine intent to make things better. I know, because I was one of them.
The cheap system I have with a Google Coral and FOSS software is pretty good about detecting people and dogs from my camera streams. Sometimes it detects my one dog as a small bear if I haven’t cut his hair recently.
Having such systems as a later if defense is good. As the only defense, not so much.
The cheap system I have with a Google Coral and FOSS software
I’m guessing you’re using Frigate?
Having such systems as a later if defense is good. As the only defense, not so much.
Agreed. The system I had developed was built explicitly as a human-in-the-loop system. It never made any decisions on its own. It was just a tool to enable the existing security staff to have better visibility. That’s it.
You can make whatever argument you want about viability and efficacy. The only point I’m making is that our system was just an additional tool for security to use; not the only one.
Yup. I wasn’t disagreeing so much as pointing out a common failing with AI adoption in general: the number of cases where it’s being implement as a replacement for existing functional systems or humans rather than an augment to them. The “additional tool” aspect is 100% my preferred use case (where it functionally makes sense), but many are seeing it as a human-replacement that feeds into their desire for control/subservience, cost-reduction, or rent-seeking.
Local-AI actually has a lot of useful cases, and AI vision is something that in many forms has been around for awhile and is generally fairly effective. It’s great as a tool for indexing or enriching visual data that would otherwise at best a slog and at worst improbable for a human. Surveillance video is especially good with this. I see it as an addition to motion detection. Instead of needing to go through hours of footage of video, you only need to go through stuff where movement was detected, and from that you could further search for “frames tagged as having a person/bear/vehicle/whatever”. The thing is, I’m not depending on it to protect me from running into a bear when I go out out my trash (although Frigate can do alerting), but I could use it to follow how the bear moved between cameras/zones through my property and possibly use that to better bear-proof the premesi
In this particular case, it might be somewhat useful as an early warning if it can actively detect human+firearm, but there were obviously going to be either a number of false positives or negatives that make it less valuable as such. It could still be useful in reconstruction or actively following some incidents, but we need to keep humans in the loop too.
AI isn’t bad/evil or good when used correctly and with knowledge of the limitations in a given use-case. Trusting AI to replace humans/judgement is often very bad, and massive datacenters are obviously a major source of concern, but the issue is again in the use not the overall technology. Just like nuclear fission can produce huge amounts of power to either keep the lights on or blow stuff up, AI can help sort through your album if 5000 photos to find that one shot in a jiffy… or it can be used identify, track and you for a surveillance-state, and false positives in the latter case can make for a very bad day.
but there were obviously going to be either a number of false positives or negatives that make it less valuable as such.
It really comes down to the specifics of the technology and how it’s implemented. The system I worked on was astonishingly good. Even the local police of a particular installment wanted to do a test of the system (basically walk around with various guns of all different sizes) and they were stunned at how well it worked.
The funny thing was that we built the system to work 100% locally, and we even insisted on air-gapped networks (but wasn’t a requirement). The amount of people and companies who asked if we could connect the system to the internet for easier access was worrying. Whenever we tried to explain the basics of data security and the potential issues we were just looked at like we were nuts.
Yeah, cameras should almost always be on a segregated network, preferably with port-security. The NVR may need to connect to the Internet for updates - assuming one can’t just upload that via the UI - but that’s about it.
Using AI to stop school shootings it the type of idiot idea Sasha Baron Cohen would get a tech bro to unironically support. So much news these days feels like black comedy or satire
Ive been hearing SBC having been acting weird politically recently, hes apparently a very pro-zionist.
Recently? I don’t think Borat could have come from someone who wasn’t a zionist. This, however, was before the average joe cared about that stuff.
Generally I think he’s been on the right side of history, but with the current situation I think he’s let his personal ties with Israel through Judaism put him in a bad position.
I don’t think it’s uncommon amongst those in the Jewish community. They’ve been raised in families that saw Israel as reparations after the holocaust. To now acknowledge that “their own people” have turned into the oppressors that they escaped… that’s something many will be unable to accept.
I hear it’s really splitting the British Jewish community.
Wasn’t there also a separate incident of a kid holding a harmless item (food?) that an AI system tagged as a gun?
Crazy crap
Bananas are not joke.
Didn’t that guy did an AMA on Reddit years ago? Kinda remember something like this being dunked on as another surveillance company trying to cash out on school shootings
Well, the suit is by a minor, so their name is being withheld and this is from January 2025, so the reddit AMA was probably a different school shooting survivor.
Omnilert cofounder Ara Bagdasarian
I mean this person
If there is, I can’t find it. Sounds like an AMA where the person would get dragged over the coals, but who knows with nuReddit.
Why is this any better than a metal detector?
Asking the real questions here. My guess would be: they didn’t have metal detectors, the metal detectors they had reached end-of-life, or preexisting metal detectors failed to integrate into a modern, unified surveillance system. And so the use of AI analytics tools, atop (preexisting) camera systems seemed more hassle-free (a subscription-based software integration) and cost-effective in the short term; that is if the unproven compromise bares any trust…
Metal detectors in schools are dystopian and nobody who works in a school wants them.
Metal detectors in schools are dystopian
Sounds like they fit right in in the country where children are regularly and routinely murdered while at school and society at large is ok with it.
I’d love to hear your underlaying opinions about the population of the US.
They’re also a pain in the ass, because guns are hardly the only metal thing that gets brought into and out of schools.
So you need paid security guards at every entrance at all times, to go through the metal detector results and determine what is and isn’t a false alarm.
AI is so much better and not dystopian 🙏
The detection processing is completely invisible. It’s just a tool. How it’s used is what determines if it’s dystopian or not. Seeing the state the US is in, I’d argue the country itself is dystopian and this system is trying to somewhat protect people from that dystopia.
Metal detectors are a logistical nightmare in a school
Worse than getting shot?
What’s to stop someone from shooting up the massive line of kids trying to get through the metal detectors in the morning?
Clearly we need to stagger arrival times, forcing most kids to get up even earlier just to wait.
@Passerby6497@lemmy.world @driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br If you install multiple gates side-by-side, and let students leave any metal objects in their lockers, I don’t think it’s that restrictive. But in my country of residence these cases are so rare, considering these systems is a first for me, so I’m by no means an expert.
What’s the problem? It’s still gotta be like, 99.9% accurate in detecting guns, right?
That’s fine, right? What are the chances that the 0.1% of guns that get through will happen here, right? Right?
In all seriousness (in case you couldn’t sense the sarcasm), I bet the company will stand by that 99.9%, and will win.
This is the logical endpoint of technology capitalism. Even authority figures have so many constant draws on their attention? And so many suffer from un-or-under-diagnosed attention issues, coupled with constant and unrelenting anxiety about performance and about the world around them collapsing, that “outsource thinking so that I have less of it to do” is the hot new commodity
Even the greatest most infallible gun detection system imaginable can be defeated by having the gun inside a plastic bag.
Not hot dog
Soooooo… which is going to ultimately turn out to be more effective way of detecting guns: AI systems, or dowsing? Both are gonna suck, be wholly inadequate for the purpose, and be giant wastes of public money - but obviously, but I’ve gonna admit, AI at least as mild possibility of being better than random chance. In optimal conditions. Maybe.
(You may be thinking “pfffft, surely people wouldn’t be stupid enough use dowsing rods to detect weapons, that’s just so clearly stupid”, but they did, and this “solution” was sold to them by slick conmen. …Sounds familiarrrr???)
AI can’t even detect a fully formed gun, and California thinks the AI will have no problems detecting gun parts from just gcode??
Soon: ai not meant to detect guns or prevent shootings, read fine print Court: OK cool, case dismissed
Next up: “AI has no duty to protect and serve”
I guarantee their contract already has a legal disclaimer for this exact scenario.
