HN Reader

I feel like as soon as a particular type of student learns that this is used, they'll have an excellent way to get that test that they didn't study for postponed, and even have plausible deniability that they didn't intend to lock the school down. At least for the first one or two times, after that it's back to triggering the fire alarm.

It's not exactly the same situation, but this happened before AI. At least the clarinet owner didn't get shot & killed like this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Harry_Stanley

On 22 September 1999, Stanley was returning home from the Alexandra Pub in South Hackney carrying, in a plastic bag, a table leg that had been repaired by his brother earlier that day. Someone had phoned the police to report "an Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag".[2]

On a long enough timeline, without any changes, this garbage is going to get a kid murdered by overzealous LEOs (or teachers in places where they want the carrying.)

They tried to find contraband, they found a marching band!

Well at least it wasn't a bag of chips this time. A clarinet is at least a step towards the correct shape. Sounds like the AI training is going well!

Is the gun situation hopeless in America? As far as I can tell, we just need to reduce the quantity of guns. Somehow 20% of the country takes that idea as an existential threat, even though not doing so is a material threat to real people.

If it's actually a mental health crisis, then how do we solve that one? Especially with what the Republicans are doing right now?

> “We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”

Of course the co-founder of the company that made the error would say that.

Good grief, imagine if it had been an oboe.

This hardly needs to be said here, but there should have been human review of the AI output before taking any drastic action. That would (I assume, though since I can't read the original article I don't know if that assumption is correct) have immediately let them know that the alleged "gun" was nothing of the sort, and avoided the massive disruption of a totally unnecessary lockdown.

Its weird how object detection models are "AI" now. These models and their weird errors have been around for quite a while. The issue is vendors claiming that there is no chance of errors. Ideally you would have a 2 eyes system such that if AI has a tolerable false positive rate and have a human review. But of course, you cant fire people with AI so why would we do the sane thing.

And of course there are policy wonks who would make gun ownership a human rights issue even though its fundamentally unsafe to have such free gun ownership.

weapon of brass destruction

Don't these cops receive an image/video of the event in addition to the AI description?? Who tf. designed the system?

Maybe its not wrong? Clarinets have harmed me far more than guns ever have...

As much as I believe this is a story that needs to be told, why did the author of the article choose one of those annoying two-sentence millennial titles? Do they actually generate more publicity?

A man saw a snappy two-sentence title. He was mildly annoyed.

Another false positive of a system working as intended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45684934 (the doritos gun)

I have so, so many questions.....

Why are there cameras in schools? Why are they looking for guns? Why are they using AI to do it?

Could this not all be avoided by not letting kids have guns or am i missing the point?

Lots of jokes made, but in reality this mistake could have been made by a real human watching a video feed. The student was intentionally mimicking a weapon with a long, tubular object. It's not like he was just walking down the hall with it in his hands, and suddenly SWAT TEAM!

AI is often awful, but I'm giving it a pass on this one.

Next up, the guy, probably named Buttle, will get billed for the intervention.

Just ban music instruments altogether then! No need to fix the dang LLM prompt this way! /s