Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition (grandforksherald.com)

> How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it.

Because we're seeing the first instances of what reality looks like with AI in the hands of the average bear. Just like the excuse was "but the computer said it was correct," now we're just shifting to "but the AI said it was correct."

Don't underestimate how much authority and thinking people will delegate to machines. Not to mention the lengths they'll go to weasel out of taking responsibility for a screw up like this (saw another comment in this thread about the Chief of Police stepping down but it being framed as "retirement").

This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI and in particular cops with facial recognition tools, dragnet LPR surveillance tools, and all this other new technology that essentially picks somebody's name out of a hat to have their life temporarily (or [semi-]permanently) ruined by shithead cops who won't ever face any real accountability.

This keeps happening, and the reason it keeps happening is that shithead cops have these tools and are using them. Until we can find a reliable way to prevent this from happening, which may or may not be possible, cops who may or may not be shitheads should not have access to these tools.

Reminds me of a case that just popped up in my neck of the woods.

Man gets pulled over on an expired plate. They search based on this fact, find a pill bottle (for Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and magically find he’s trafficking cocaine and fentanyl.

Months later a lab test exonerates the poor guy.

https://www.wyff4.com/article/deputies-falsely-identify-ibs-...

It's not. This is just an acceleration in the unraveling of society facilitated by AI. As someone whose childhood included so many "robots will kill humans" books and movies, I am flabbergasted that the AI apocalypse will be dumb humans overtrusting faulty AI in important matters until everything falls apart.

Most humans cannot distinguish AI from actual intelligence. When you combine that with bureaucrats innate tendency to say, "Computer said so," you end up with bizarre situations like this. If a person had made this facial match, another human would have relentlessly jeered him. Since a computer running AI did it, no one even cared to think about it.

Computers are wildly dangerous, not because of anything innate but because of how humans act around them.

> How is this the fault of AI?

AI is being used by bureaucrats and enforcers to justify lazy, harmful conclusions. You don't live in the real world if you think "just punish the bureaucrats, don't make it about AI" is going to remotely rectify this toxic feedback loop and ecosystem.

It is the fault of the coders, the salespeople who over-promised the capabilities of the system, the lawmakers who have not regulated or demanded a minimum percentage of accuracy from those products, the AI' company's onboarding trainers, the cops that were trained to use the software, the jailers, and maybe other related positions that should've taken a better interest in making a better system, not a more cruel one

If many people's writing skills are suffering, due to highly convenient AI support, just imagine how fast mediocre crime investigation skills are going to devolve.

It is going to get bad in every skilled area of human managed bureaucracy.

The number of legal filings found to include AI confabulations is just the obvious surface.

> How is this the fault of AI?

The false positive rate combined with scanning millions of pictures might make the chance of arresting the wrong person really high.

It's the fault of the tool because our society treats the tools as superior judgements than humans and to be trusted completely as a means of deflecting accountability - something any and every minority group has been warning about for fucking decades.

The reason everyone rushes to defend the tool's use is because holding humans accountable would mean throwing these tools out entirely in most cases, due to internal human biases and a decline in basic critical and cognitive thinking skills. The marketing has been the same since the 80s: the tool is superior (until it isn't), the tool shall be trusted completely (until it fails), the tool cannot make mistakes (until it does).

If folks actually listened to the victims of this shit, companies like Flock and Palantir would be gutted and their founders barred from any sort of office of responsibility, at minimum. The fact so many deflect blame from the tool like the marketing manual demands shows they don't actually give a shit about the humans wrapped up in the harms, or the misuse and misappropriation of these tools by persons wholly unaccountable under the law, but only about defending a shiny thing they personally like.

> A live human detective confirmed it.

I doubt it, due to human nature. Perhaps the process says the human must consciously validate, but a lot of humans in many cases will just rubberstamp what the AI said. That's the risk.

Automation has a strong tendency to degrade diligence.

I see this all the time in operational / production settings. Having a loop with automation reviewed and approved by a human degrades very fast. I only approve automation that has a quick path to unsupervised operation.

> How is this the fault of AI?

I'll reply to the top of the discussion too: it's because it was purely made for this purpose. There's no use for it outside surveillance. And it's not even good enough. It's only purpose is checking boxes and transferring money. Miscarriage of justice is an unfortunate, but calculated side effect.

> Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman

One big reason for AI adoption everywhere is that you can use it as a scapegoat

Study after study has shown a very strong and consistent bias of humans to trust "automated systems" in face of any ambiguity

> How is this the fault of AI

It isn't, the article doesn't claim (or even imply) that it is "the fault" of AI, only that AI was part of the chain of events, and nothing is the fault of AI until AI is sufficiently advanced to constitute a moral actor. “At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, one of which is the error of blaming it on the computer” remains true.

OTOH, it is potentially the fault of the reliance human actors put on an AI determination.

I think it's more nuanced; it is one error in a Tragedy of Errors.

I think the biggest problem is that the popular narratives about AI enable this like of accountability sink.

100% 100% 100% humanity is so obsessed with ai that we're losing...our humanity. "blame the mindless, soulless robots! how could we have possibly known that they need to be supervised?! aren't they basically just humans that don't need to rest or eat?"

Someone from the government should be in jail for this kind of oversight.

Devils advocate: what if a facial recognition system with a large enough database can always find an unrelated/innocent person that looks similar enough to convince the human?

computer said yes

> How is this the fault of AI?

It could be the fault of the company that's selling this service. They often make wildly inaccurate claims about the utility and accuracy of their systems. [0]

> There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people.

Yes we do. [1]

> and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.

Her guilt was assessed. That's why she had no bail. It assessed it incorrectly, but the error is more complicated than your reaction implies.

[0]: https://thisisreno.com/2026/03/lawsuit-reno-police-ai-polici...

[1]: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...

At this point I think that AI will perform human duties better than human. So probably it's better to let AI autonomously jail people, of course with all the necessary procedures as required by law.

Because if you let this slide the human, such as he is, will be removed from the loop and these mistakes will become acceptable once departments get used to how cheap the AI is compared to a human. There will be no going back and mistakes like this will just become accepted collateral damage.

Where does it say that AI is blamed.

It says she was misidentified using facial recognition.

That’s exactly what happened

> How is this the fault of AI?

Humans being human. Getting lazy, being incompetent, getting incompetent with AI use or simply being biased. The wrongfully arrested person doesn't even resamble the perpetrator.

Maybe if they were held accountable forthese actions, they would act responsibly?

> How is this the fault of AI?

It is not. It is the fault of the police

AI models are tools. When mistakes are made they are the mistake of the operator of said tool

This AI model was badly misused, this woman should get a metric shit tonne of compensation, but it was the fault of the police.

I hope you take this as a teaching/learning opportunity

It literally doesn't matter -- you're focused on the wrong thing. She could be that woman's exact twin and it wouldn't matter. Spending six months in jail and losing your house, your car, and your dog with the flimsiest of evidence is ridiculous.

With all the lovely qualified immunity doctrine? That's wishful thinking.

imho the US Marshals are the only innocent party here, as my understanding is they don't do investigations and just serve warrants without any knowledge of the underlying case.

>I hope she wrings at least several million dollars out of the government.

which the citizens end up footing the bill for. yay.

“Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog.”

Who stole her dog?!

The concept of pre-trial detention is nuts to me. In Ireland, sensibly, you can not set bail that is insurmountable to the defendant.

The Fargo DA should be fired, at a minimum.

> It is an AI error, but also an error on the part of the cops, the prosecutors, the judge, and the county sheriff

Yes, it's critical to remember that multiple parties can be at fault. In a case like this, it is true that

a) law enforcement misused a tool and demonstrated extreme negligence

b) the judiciary didn't catch this, which suggests systemic negligence there too when it comes to their oversight responsibilities

c) the company selling/providing this AI tool should have known it was likely to be misused and is responsible for damages caused by such predictable usage

We cannot have a just world until our laws and norms result in loss of jobs and legitimacy as punishment for this sort of normalized failure, from all three parties. Immunity is a failed experiment.

Even if she was a read ringer (clearly not the same person to any human who glances at the image), common sense should tell you that among 340,000,000 Americans there are a lot of lookalikes. Clearly there's a kind of stupid belief in the mystic powers of an AI and a callous disregard for the well being of suspects. No one should be dragged 1000 miles and held for months based on a facial match, especially when exculpatory evidence was easily available.

This x1000. We need to suspend this shared fiction that AI has any agency. Only humans can be responsible. Full stop.

> It is an AI error

The software identified the person as Angela Lipps. According to the court documents, the Fargo detective working the case then looked at Lipps' social media accounts and Tennessee driver's license photo.

In his charging document, the detective wrote that Lipps appeared to be the suspect based on facial features, body type and hairstyle and color.

The software worked exactly as intended. It's a filtering tool that sifts through data for common patterns to provide leads, not matches. It raises a flag on persons of interest. You can be a "match" anywhere between 0 and 100% and only relative to some specific input (like that picture taken from the top of the woman at the teller). In that sens mismatches are within acceptable parameters and have been known to happen.

A "match" is a pronouncement ultimately made by the humans that uses the tool, after they've checked out the leads. Someone slept at the wheel here.

I followed the inquiry when it was ongoing — all of the depositions were live on YouTube. The level of both hubris and incompetence involved in that case was breathtaking.

If you can get your hands on it, I recommend the 4 episode BAFTA-winning mini-series about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office

Reminded me of this video of AI software causing an innocent men to be arrested: https://thecivilrightslawyer.com/2026/03/11/ai-software-tell...

Now I'm in a blind rage all over again.

Yeah but they haven’t made the Fargo police chief an honorary senator yet, which is basically what they did with Vennells.

posting the video directly for those who prefer that format

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPUBXN2Fd_E

as an aside how small the world is: I know-a-guy who knows-that-guy.

I am from a town that gets national news coverage only for Shenanigans like this.

> chief of police also resigned today

Source?

I disagree. If you focus on holding the software creators to account in lieu of the humans in the loop, the we only reinforce the behavior of offloading thinking to the system.

If I am a cop in another jurisdiction and I see that in this case of error, the facial recognition company was held to account but not the police or municipality, I will be more likely to blindly trust the software assuming that they either patched it or will take responsibility.

We should demand accountability for both.

You can blame both. The prosecutors and police that didn't do their proper due diligence, falsely imprisoning this woman, and held her for months without due process. And also the AI company that submitted a false police report and the defamation of character. There's no reason for either of them to escape the blame.

>Start holding capital to account

You forgot one: capital cannot be held accountable for making a tool used in a crime. It is a simple generalization of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), passed in 2005, which largely bars civil lawsuits against gun makers and sellers when their products are later used in crime.

Strongly agree here. This is an extremely predictable outcome of selling AI facial recognition software to American police forces.

Is there anything to suggest this sort of injustice isn't happening in low-tech all the time, constantly, all over the country, and the only reason it's getting attention here is because AI is involved?

[dead]

This quote from a 1979 IBM training manual remains applicable:

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

(https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/ai-decision-making-where-...)

Appealing to authority ("The AI said it was her!") is absolutely a problem.

Yes, Fargo will be lucky to survive the lawsuit.

Mistake? Haha. We don't make mistakes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s

We do the work, you do the pleasure!

Except in "Brazil" it was a mechanical error in a deterministic machine caused by an invasive outside actor. It would be reasonable to trust that the autotypewriter/printer would faithfully output the correct text.

Modern AI seems incapable of any respectable amount of accuracy or precision. Trusting that to destroy somebody's life is even more farcical than the oppressive police in "Brazil".

There are a bunch of ways they get people to sign away their right to speedy trials.

Defendants don't invoke that because in most states and federally, they build the case against you slowly over a long period of time before arrest, then stall as long as possible for discovery, then when they finally fulfill discovery they overwhelm you with a bunch of useless stuff so that it takes forever to get the useful information. Invoking right to speedy trial means the prosecution gets a very strong advantage to the defense.

What did you hope to achieve by posting his details?

Indeed. Something like the Post Office Scandal would never happen anywhere but in the US.

People will defend this, too, saying “well, she was eventually exonerated, right? So the system works!” Ignoring how she’ll never be fully reimbursed for the time, money, and grief of going through the system.

> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial

This is from the Sixth Amendment. Where the rubber hits the road is what “speedy” means.

I think you have the interpretation correct. It seems like any state can say you're a fugitive from their state and now you have even fewer rights. Every day I learn some new fact about "justice" in the United States.

As a Tennessee resident I don't love learning that some dumb fuck state I want nothing to do with can call me a fugitive and my state will hold me prisoner without trial when said dumb fuck state finally decides is ready to deal with me.

I believe each state has its own extradition process. In this scenario think of them more like the countries in the EU. Apparently Tennessee doesn't adequately protect its residents.

I read it as her arrested and held in Tennessee temporarily then flown to North Dakota.

You must have been reading something else, because this article includes all of that information.

> In Tennessee, she was given a court appointed lawyer for the extradition process. To fight the charges, she was told she would have to go to North Dakota.

> Officers from North Dakota did not pick up Lipps from her jail cell in Tennessee until Oct. 30 — 108 days after her arrest. The next day she made her first appearance in a North Dakota courtroom to fight the charges.

> "If the only thing you have is facial recognition, I might want to dig a little deeper," said Jay Greenwood, the lawyer representing Lipps in North Dakota.

It's both. It's good to acknowledge that AI is easy to misuse in this manner but it doesn't detract from the fact that the ultimate responsibility lies in those that should be verifying the tool output.

There is far too little skepticism around the magic box that solves all problems which is causing issues like this. It's not the fault of the AI (as if it could be assigned liability) for being misused, but this kind of misuse is far too common right now so scare stories like this are helpful and we should highlight the use of AI in mistakes like this.

We should probably stop telling the cops that this hammer is great for drywall.

I'm banned from Amazon KDP publishing for life because a fraud detection bot hallucinated that my e-book was plagiarizing my paperback (it didn't realize they're the same book). A bunch of email appeals that I'm pretty sure were also bots went nowhere. With each appeal, the reasons for my ban got progressively more vague, until they didn't mention the plagiarism part at all, just something nonsensical about creating a negative customer experience. Evil company.

> The problem is our governments are doing absolutely nothing about it

Huh. I thought they were actively accelerating the process. Hoping you are right and I am wrong.

I would argue it was both. No doubt this company was marketing it in a way to make it seem very reliable. And all of the procedural things afterwards made the error so much more damaging.

But imo this is why local police departments should not have access to this kind of tool. It is too powerful, and the statistical interpretation is too complicated for random North Dakota cops to use responsibly. Neither the company nor the PD have an incentive to be careful.

They're slapping AI in the title of any article that vaguely relates to get more clicks. This unfortunately works extremely well (see this thread)

Happens with a lot of topics of interest.

Human police errors are so routine that they're not news worthy.

> https://archive.is/yCaVV

When I load this URL I get "One more step Please complete the security check to access" and I cannot get past the archive.is computational paywall.

But the guardian article actually has text! Thanks.

It must land as human's fault or this will become more and more of a pattern to avoid accountability.

> are the tools built in such a way as to deceive the user into a false sense of trust or certainty? _Some_ of the blame lies on the UX here. It must.

Are AI code assist tools built in such a way as to deceive the user into a false sense of trust or certainty? Very much so (even if that isn't a primary objective).

Does any part of the blame lie on the UX if a dev submits a bad change? No, none.

You are ultimately, solely responsible for your work output, regardless of which tool you choose to use. If using your tool wrong means you make someone homeless, car-less, and also you kill their dog, then you should be a lot more cautious and perform a lot more verification than the average senior engineer.

> they don't know how to use than the tools themselves.

No, the tools work perfectly as they were design to work. The problem is that the tools are flawed.

Ultimately, every single of these decisions should be approved by a human, which should be responsible for the fuck up no matter what the consequences are.

> _Some_ of the blame lies on the UX here. It must.

No, the blame lies with the person or the group who approve the usage of these tools, without understanding their shortcomings.

Spoken like someone who isn’t built for a sales role at said company.

Sales will sell the dream, who cares if the real world outcomes don’t align?

A jury will probably decide the AI company's level of responsibility at trial. It is an open question til then!

Your picking apart the words doesn't matter if police are more incompetent with AI than without it. AI being the catalyst to a worse society is a more interesting and worthwhile topic than whether "AI is responsible" is the right way to phrase it.

If you make the AI software, then your software malfunctioned.

If the laser printer screws up a page in the middle of the document, and the user doesn't catch it and includes it in the board of directors binder, the laser printer still malfunctioned.

Brave police officers wanted to show us all the dangers of AI slop.

[flagged]

As much as we try to reward the first person to submit the story, we also have to give credit to the person who submits the best URL and the best version of the story. It looks like your submission was killed due to being an archive.is link, which is not allowed as a URL for a submission (we need the canonical URL submitted to prevent people from using archive services or shorteners to mask domains that may be malicious).

Sometimes it's just a matter of luck as to who gets the submission right and gets the karma. Sorry it wasn't you this time, but keep submitting good stuff and you'll get your turn.

How else can they report on BREAKING NEWS if it doesn't at least break your concentration?

Because it has an updating-feed-like structure, in which new items can appear.

Knowing that there are (N) new items is so useful (to some people), that as far back as the 1990s, we developed technology called "RSS" to give you this superpower over a website that doesn't provide anything of the sort. One that simply updates with new stuff when you hit refresh, with no UI to indicate what is new/changed.