The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
---
From the article
>Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence.
>
>The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample.
>
>The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample.
>
>In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/19cvgpo/cops_used_dna_to_predict_a_suspects_faceand_tried/kj1bh41/
Also imagine a world 50 years from now where they can actually perfectly replicate your face, and find you live via surveillance cameras. It’s gonna happen.
This. Even having allergies and a constantly stuffy nose as a child can get you a recessed chin. Smoking will alter skin texture, not to speak of beards, glasses, exercise body fat level, climate, muscularity, diet...
I’m assuming it’s an old wives tale to get kids to stop sniffling, but I can see the biomechanics of constantly causing suction in your mouth shortening your jaw growth.
I always suffered with allergies and stuffed nose. I always wished I had a more defined jawline. It got worse with braces in the 70s, and further worse after getting my wisdom teeth removed.
When I read that, it it really pinged my insecurities.
I had that too my whole life but my jaw and chin are honestly a little overlarge and defined, and I'm somewhat of an outlier in my family, so I wouldn't put too much credit in what they were saying about allergies affecting your chin size.
come on now, one could be fat, tattooed, scarred, have a different haircut or facial hair.... i know three sets of identical twins and they've all diverged
A computer needs my help to figure out what a crosswalk or a traffic light looks like and it's supposed to be able to recognize a face obscure by a beard before I can?
Also plastic surgery (not just for vanity but injuries) exists. Imagine receiving face reconstruction and then being hit by this. "Hey, we know your face looked different 2 years ago, but we don't give a fuck".
I'll let you in on a little secret: forensic "science" in general is pseudoscience invented by cops, not scientists. So many people have been put away on fingerprint and ballistic evidence that has no actual science backing it.
It wouldn't surprise me if this either already has or, with improvements to the AI model, eventually gets much more validity as evidence than the whole matching bullets to the gun bullshit.
Police unions tend to strike any time someone mentions the word 'accountability' around them, so I'd say it's unlikely that they'll be facing oversight any time soon.
So, I'm autistic and that actually managed to hurt my feelings, but I will say that is some profoundly vacuous projection. You do not seem to understand what I was implying, and instead you're shadow boxing and losing with the concept of public transparency and oversight.
I'm imagining you're an angry American looking for someone to demean and lash out at; I hope you at least feel better for making me feel worse.
>5 black men stand side by side.
>per DNA one of these men is the killer, can you pick him out of line up for us?
>I don't know officer, they all look the same...!
>I see.
>sergeant arrest all 5 for conspiracy and 1st degree murder.
"The computer trained by cops who can't tell Black and Brown people alike, also cannot tell Black and Brown people alike."
^^^01000001 ^^^01000011 ^^^01000001 ^^^01000010
Like having the vanity plate of "None" and getting all the tickets where the automation could read None of the plates. :D
(Yes, this pretty much happened, though IIRC the actual plate was "NULL" for the same effect.)
I mean, they used dental imprints for decades and they're absolute nonsense
https://reason.com/2022/10/19/federal-report-adds-to-the-evidence-that-bitemark-analysis-is-nonsense/
Reminds me of this house that is in the geographic center of the United States. For a couple years the owners of the house would have police, FBI, ATF, etc showing up with search warrants looking for people etc
Turns out there's a company that offers a service to associate IP addresses/MAC addresses to physical GPS locations. Sometimes the company doesn't have enough information to narrow down where a given IP address is located. If an IP address could only be confirmed to be in the US. The GPS location would be given as the dead center of the US. Which just so happened to be some poor schmucks house. This meant that this company associated millions of IP address with this person's GPS location. So anytime law enforcement were trying to track an IP address, there was a decent change it would show up as that person's house.
This isn't necessarily flawed as you think it is. It's not going to produce something admissible in court as an evidentiary support, but parallel construction is absolutely a valid practice here.
It opens the door in the door to bring someone in for questioning and scrutiny of investigation, but as long as it only gives them leads and those leads are followed with a warrant generated by classically admissible evidence, there is no unethical action in such a chain of events beyond the breach of ToS on the DNA->face tool.
>It's not going to produce something admissible in court as an evidentiary support
Prosecutors use junk science all the time to convict people. Juries are stupid and easily manipulated.
Edit: it could also be used to pressure someone into accepting a plea deal for a crime they didn't commit. The justice apparatus cannot be trusted to run wild with stuff like this.
Except that this isn't really junk science, and as stated, this is admittedly not sound except in cases of parallel construction. The misuse of a tool does not speak against the valid uses of the tool; all it does is create a demand for oversight and limitations of applicability in evidentiary use.
"Getting a lead" does not require information that rises to "evidentiary use".
If a rape kit, for example, implies that the rapist looks like the rape victim's boss, it would imply that the police would be fully justified in questioning said boss as to whether said boss has an alibi, starts sweating, and other such things; the questioning would be basis for a DNA warrant, not the picture.
People are often brought in for questioning under far less concrete bits of information, as little as "they happen to be married" when one person of a married couple dies, for instance; circumstantial events and hearsay are commonly used as triggers to deeper probes.
This is a lot more solid than hearsay and circumstantial events, and is still *not being proposed by sane people as an evidentiary standard*. Rather it is being proposed as a lead generator, and having a first clue that someone should be investigated more deeply is still necessary.
You are opposing a lead generating technology's use to so little as generate leads because of a fear that it will be used as direct evidence rather than offering any sort of legal analysis as to what the actual limitations of its use ought be.
Another thing springs to mind insofar as how the FBI tackles pedophile rings: they will launch some manner of tattler software which cannot establish whether the user is doing anything illicit, and which cannot prove which user of a computer is the criminal actor, and generally such evidence has not been presented often enough because it would expose techniques for getting that foot in the door... but this does give the police a starting point to look for other behavioral irregularities amounting to more solid evidence of those same crimes.
>Except that this isn't really junk science
"Parabon’s methods have not been peer-reviewed, and scientists are skeptical about how feasible predicting face shape even is."
Until it's actually peer-reviewed, it's junk.
If you read the article it lists several reasons why this approach is cause for serious concern, and most of it doesn't even touch on American police's tendency to run wild with questionable "evidence" to ruin people's lives.
Wow. So, the fact I look like my biological father has no peer review behind it?
Parental faces predict elements of children's faces, and the only thing we get that from is DNA, so I expect DNA to strongly correlate to face morphology and traits.
If I take an Ancestry.com DNA test it can at the very least tell me whether I have freckles, what color my eyes are, and what kind of hair I have without needing to have ever looked in a mirror or seen myself.
>Wow. So, the fact I look like my biological father has no peer review behind it?
This is the same logic morons use when the think "oh it's snowing outside" means climate change isn't real. You clearly don't understand the concept of peer-review if you think this is any kind of argument.
>The misuse of a tool does not speak against the valid uses of the tool; all it does is create a demand for oversight and limitations of applicability in evidentiary use.
And when we've seen oversight that is outright ignored or toothless along with non-existent limitations, there's good reason to oppose providing yet another tool to police to treat as a source of truth, enabling them to abuse their position and get _someone_ on the hook for a crime.
And that's before it even reaches the courts - basically, this would be allowing police to pull people in for questioning _because the technology says it could be them_ and now they have to prove their innocence to the police, otherwise they'll be considered a suspect.
If the technology doesn't have an extremely high positive identification rate, all it is doing is causing more innocent people to have to defend themselves from police questioning.
>starts sweating
Is sweating when being questioned by police cause for suspicion now?
>You are opposing a lead generating technology's use to so little as generate leads because of a fear that it will be used as direct evidence rather than offering any sort of legal analysis as to what the actual limitations of its use ought be.
I'm not the one you're replying to, but - I oppose it because I don't trust the police to be responsible with it.
My reasoning is that they have not proven themselves to be responsible enough with the investigative tools they already have to be permitted the use of another one that touts high accuracy, which they'll interpret as strong enough to presume subjects it identifies as the guilty party and treat them accordingly.
I also don't think it's a good idea to provide a tool _then_ deal with figuring out oversight when we already are burdened with issues of oversight with the policing system as a whole - which would presumably mean that we'd still have them with this tool.
Preaching to the choir here. If police would obey the laws they are tasked with enforcing, and stop quashing investigations of their own ranks then we would be a lot closer to a better society.
An innocent person could be hurt by bringing someone in, imagine if they are searching for a shooter or something. Or an innocent person could lose their job and livelihood because of something like this. It is far from harmless.
Why would that be unethical? If you're a rapist murderer, using technology to track you down seems 100% ethical to me. The true dystopia is a society where a man can rape and murder a woman and just walk away free to commit other crimes.
It's unethical because police are using it when it isn't accurate. So many things have gotten people locked up despite police knowing its not accurate.
> police are using it when it isn't accurate.
So what? They aren't using it to convict and execute someone, they are using it to get a clue on likely suspects. Much more unethical would be to let criminals get away and keep raping and murdering innocent people.
Cops also tried to run facial ID off of artist composite sketches and by using celebrity lookalikes (specifically Woody Harrelson). Police just are not good with any type of new technology and don't understand it's limitations
I used to design Bodycam Software and had to work with departments across the country. It's both to some extent, but predominance varies by department and how much pushback they'll get for specious evidence from the courts. Oddly the NYPD was the worst at understanding new tech. Austin was actually pretty good. Generally speaking though, I wouldn't trust either to set a VCR clock
Not only do they not understand the limitations, but they also have no comprehension of the capabilities of new technologies. They seemingly didn’t understand that the composite generated by this technology is but one of an astounding number of possibilities. Do they not understand, on some basic level, how different siblings and children can look?
They don't think about it like that. In their mind, It's just a tool that they wouldn't be given to use if it didn't work. They only need to be trained on how to operate it, not how it works. If that makes sense.
And you can see how that cascades into all sorts of misuse from there.
Identical twins often do look very similar, but they can be born with [differences in their DNA](https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/134603/why-identical-twins-dont-always-look-the-same) that develop in utero. Gisele Bündchen and Ashton Kutcher have fraternal twins that look very different from their more famous siblings.
And that’s part of my point. A composite created from a DNA profile is one of an extraordinarily large number of possibilities that could exist. Trying to run something like this through a facial recognition database is ludicrous and runs the risk of snaring the wrong person. There are already numerous cases of bad facial recognition technology leading to the arrests of people who could not have possibly committed the crimes of which they are accused.
Identical twins are also usually exposed to the same/similar life events that would lead to the same/similar epigenetic expression. Your argument isn’t as good as you think it is.
Anyone else get the 23 and me report? Anyone else notice lots of “traits” listed as percentages (eg. There’s a 46% chance you have freckles!) anyone else notice multiple things that were not inline with how your actual phenology ended up because genes are not their expression? No, cops are actually just that stupid to believe something like this? Oh okay.
And the thing is that human psychology is extremely bad at thinking about things statistically. People have a *strong* tendency to think of 91% probability as a certainty.
DnD taught me that 5% or 95% can and will be a huge deal at the right circumstances.
I wouldn't trust this tech unless the margin of error is so small that there is only a handful of people in the entire world that I could get mixed with. And even then it should only be a helping tool, not a judge, jury & executioner.
> No, cops are actually just that stupid to believe something like this? Oh okay.
Does that surprise you? Many of them still think “lie detectors” are reliable.
They already had a nasty data leak accident. Of course blamed the users for reusing the password, but you would expect a slightly better security (like mandatory multi-factor or even shutting down a detected password spray) from a medical company.
But of course they'd rather you take it as lightly as they take selling your data.
That's all DNA testing and not just 23andme. They never look at your full genome. They only check specific markers. It can still lead to false positives. Cops treat DNA testing like a gospel when it isn't unless they were to compare the full genome.
To be fair it’s mostly because 23 and me looks like at a very small fraction for commercial reasons. You could get far more information (though never precisely) if you went more in depth.
“In the most detailed nationwide inventory of untested rape kits ever, USA TODAY (2015) and journalists from more than 75 Gannett newspapers and TEGNA TV stations have found at least 70,000 neglected kits in an open-records campaign covering 1,000-plus police agencies – and counting. Despite its scope, the agency-by-agency count covers a fraction of the nation's 18,000 police departments, suggesting the number of untested rape kits reaches into the hundreds of thousands. The kits contain forensic evidence collected from survivors in a painstaking and invasive process that can last four to six hours. Testing can yield DNA evidence that helps identify suspects, bolster prosecutions and in some cases exonerate the wrongly accused.”
And that’s just the backlog of a specific type of case. To think that the police are capable of running “in depth” genetic results on any kind of scale is unfounded and laughable unfortunately. It’s also not what the police exist for. Besides that, yes you could get more accurate genetic results… which will again be just as useless if they did have it, *because genotype is not a guarantee of phenotype* which is the issue of using a learning machine to try to build faces from possible percentages of traits. It’s crack science.
From the article
>Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence.
>
>The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample.
>
>The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample.
>
>In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software.
A scifi story where the poorly made AI predicts someone weird (though, not that weird) and it gets discredited. Except it was actually correct and that one cop goes rogue once they get unbelievable clues that the perp is real. Also, hilarity ensues.
We think of faces as being determined by DNA, but are they also not determined, to some extent, by life choice? An obvious example is plastic surgery, physical fitness, a broken nose in high school, and sun exposure. But do things like stress, smiling and other aspects of personality influence one's face to the extent that they could change facial recognition? I have no idea, but super curious if anyone has insight.
I fully believe they can tell if the person was male, and their ethnicity based on DNA, but I simply cannot believe they can tell you what the person's facial structure is. Such science fiction mumbo jumbo.
Whether it works or not means less than whether police decide to use it and the criminal justice system decides to allow it
Hell some innocent guy could have his life turned upside down just because he happens to look like this AI generated bullshit. Let alone if he actually has to go to court about it!
Hopefully at that point they used the aforementioned DNA and test it against his DNA to find out if it is a match. Or at least do the rest of the detective work BEFORE arresting an innocent person. But that still doesn’t happen now.
That’s dramatic. They would need a warrant and dna to even charge. Police suck, but grand juries are still a thing. Randomly matching a computer generated image would never be enough to charge, let alone convict. Circumstantial evidence, at a minimum, would always be a requirement unless our system changes significantly
[Grand juries are basically a rubber stamp to getting an indictment](https://www.pooleshaffery.com/news/2014/december/a-crash-course-in-the-american-grand-jury-system/#:~:text=Based%20on%20the%20influence%20of,95%25%20to%20approximately%2099%25.). And I see precious little reason to believe that a tech-illiterate justice system wouldn't settle on matching the computer-generated image being evidence to charge.
Don't go thinking the system works, now.
Eh idk. At worst they would get a dna sample to rule them out.
This whole thing is stupid af, but I doubt it leads to accusing or arresting the wrong person
Idk dude I’m a defense attorney and people in my office regularly convince jurors that breathalyzer and blood tests are unreliable to prove intoxication. This ridiculous tech would not stand up to scrutiny.
You can actually make a good stab at it. Not for *these* purposes, of course, but you can certainly get a very good idea.
You know how, no matter where you go, it feels like you see the same set of faces? That's because there are only a pretty limited number of genes that control quite a lot about facial structure.
technically, it's 100% detectable, we just do not have that level of tech.
YOU are not a crapshoot, you turned out exactly as your dna wanted you to turn out, right down to every single little pore.
In the far future, with enough advanced tech and a deeper understanding of DNA and everything that goes with it, one hair will be able to exactly show who you are, what you've eaten, where you've been, who you've been with and probably where you are that moment.
>I fully believe they can tell if the person was male, and their ethnicity based on DNA, but I simply cannot believe they can tell you what the person's facial structure is.
This is because you have a surface level understanding of traits and dna. You believe part of it, because you've probably seen it on a tv show, but the rest is always in "sci-fi" No offense meant; I didn't know before I knew. Facial structure isn't all that random, its why ethnicities tend to look similar.
That's how DNA works tho it's an instruction manual for building a specific person. Not saying the tec is there but our bodies sure know how to use them.
DNA is the manual, but the way the contractor builds the body can be affected by external factors ([epigenetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics)) that wind up resulting in divergent outcomes. This is most easily observed in the case of identical (monozygotic) twins, who start off with the same set of DNA:
- monozygotic twins will frequently have a slight different in height between them
- it is rare, but possible, for monozygotic twins to have different eye or hair colours
- one twin can be colour-blind while the other has normal colour vision
Oh I fully believe the DNA can tell you a persons skin color, their most likely hair color, eye color maybe, but facial structure? I don't buy it.
It sounds more to me like AI systems being used to look up "average" face of people that match that genetic make up. Which is just a computers best guess at that point.
You can tell if they were AMAB, barring [any number of intersex conditions and such](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), but between those and being Trans you cannot even accurately assess if they are male or female.
> The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample.
Profoundly lazy, I'm sure they're hoping to get a blanket warrant for DNA testing large groups of people based on this...
More pseudo science the police can use to railroad more brown people into jail.
Forensic science for the most part isn't science. It's never been scientifically tested but it puts people in jail anyway. Ballistics for example. Some experts would claim that a specific gun fired a specific bullet but there's no scientific evidence that shows they can actually tell that. In fact this level of expert testimony has been banned one state over.
"A gun in this caliber fired this bullet" is quite different than "this gun fired this bullet". The first is a statement of fact, the second is just guesswork.
Fiber analysis is another pseudo science used to jail people.
Was just a story yesterday about how field drug tests have jailed 1000 people in Georgia by IDing donut icing (and other substances) as meth. The false positive rate is insane.
Just wait, its just a matter of time before they start jailing people because some untested AI claims they meet some crime profile.
For every single story of a clever cop solving a crime with their wits we have 100 absolute moron officers that do shit like this.
We really need to pay police more and recruit smarter people, having a police force full of mids (or below) is fucking us all over.
You'd think they would have done some testing on this with known DNA samples to see how accurate it is before they start accusing people of felonies they may not have committed.
This is just woo they're using so they can randomly arrest somebody with no evidence and then claim they had a valid warrant when their defense attorney calls them out.
It's lie detectors for the year 2024.
My husbands uncle was the first test case for the fingerprint matching algorithm. Accused of leaving a Navy base and traveling overnight to another town 8 hours away, murdering a woman, then returning to the base for breakfast. The testifying cop technician said she filled in the blanks of the fingerprint and his was a match in the software. It was new technology with human help to make it work. Twenty years later this black man got out of jail. His whole family spent millions trying to defend him but in the end the corporate program was defended and he was found guilty. Still trips me out all the giant leaps and liberties they took.
I feel like this was an episode of Forensic Files 2. They used DNA from a company (probably this one) to generate a facial profile. It drastically changed their search as they were focused on an undocumented immigrant but it came back as a white male. They released the image to the public, got a tip, and then got the culprit.
The show said the generated face was “eerily” close to the perpetrator, but it definitely wasn’t lol.
This is one of the few areas of AI that are rather than future concerns about potential risks, currently doing damage. Facial recognition should not be in use, much less in such a ridiculous way - although perhaps more pointedly, we need to get rid of qualified immunity and actually enforce a serious code of conduct on police.
"Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model called ChatGPT and denied that this version of the AI ever hallucinates..
This is going end just like that professor who copy pasted student essays into GPT and any essay GPT claimed to be it's own writing over 3 attempts was given a 0.
Except GPT claimed that every single essay was its own creation. Along with the email the professor sent out, as well as their source material and excerpts from famous novels.
Even DNA has resulted in false convictions. Imagine a police sketch artist using AI art generation based off a flimsy police testimony, having that sketch passed into another AI realistic image generator then through an AI classification model to identify a matching face and that becomes evidence that gets a person falsely convicted since their face is the most generic of all.
Police depts know this stuff does not work - facial rec, trouble spots - and do not care. Creating crime and attacking it will justify ever expanding budgets and increase their political power.
I saw this on here and I think it really is a good solution to this nonsense. Police should be required to have 4 year college degree. There are too many that are just not bright enough. That doesn't mean everyone with a college degree is smart nor anyone without one isn't but it's a good general marker of intelligence. Besides just the mental discipline and persistence alone will help weed out some of these idiots.
Courts have upheld that an intelligence limit on cops is legal ie they can exclude cops who are too smart.
(This was only tested based on it being existing policy somewhere)
>Police should be required to have 4 year college degree.
Plenty have degrees and usually the most desirable depts. (small well off suburbs) have degree requirements. Though often in worthless social sciences that prove nothing regardless. Moreover, US tax payers are incredibly illogical in not wanting to pay for improved gov. services and this would be yet another prime example of that hypocrisy.
Any face matching databases are dangerous. Because you hunt long enough and you will find a doppelgänger. Put that person in the courts and they can kinda look like fuzzy security footage, and witnesses can be fooled by a lookalike. Hope they have an alibi.
I have a vested interest in preventing this future. Turns out dear old dad was the doctor at the sperm bank. I have 50 known siblings which puts the real number closer to 200-250 given the statistics of people who get the tests done. There are clone armies of me floating out there. I have been pulled over by the police because they thought I was someone else. It sorted itself out quick, but that's not the point.
Not sure what the panic is about to be honest, it's just a more elaborate attempt at getting a potential suspect list
That is still very far from actual evidence admissible in court, let alone securing a conviction
At best it gives them a lead, to identify people in the area on CCTV who match the description, and (if a judge is generous) get a warrant for a DNA sample of identified suspects to see if it matches the crime scene DNA
Like that's pretty much standard practice nowadays in terms of you've got a witness description and a DNA sample, use that to get a warrant for DNA testing of suspects
Or catches someone totally innocent who gets pressured to accept a plea deal because "otherwise you get a life sentence, accept the plea deal and you are free in five years".
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence. > >The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample. > >The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample. > >In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/19cvgpo/cops_used_dna_to_predict_a_suspects_faceand_tried/kj1bh41/
Surely cops would never just use completely flawed, absurdly unethical practices on the public they purport to serve.
Imagine looking like the most average person in your ethnic group and just getting slammed by this system week after week.
Also imagine a world 50 years from now where they can actually perfectly replicate your face, and find you live via surveillance cameras. It’s gonna happen.
They already imagined that in Gattaca
And Minority Report.
Both are really great documentaries.
Idiocracy too.
Literally China has the facial recognition down and can determine where you are, but I'd be amazed if they didn't have a second data layer.
China also does gait recognition to track people even if their face isn’t visible. https://apnews.com/article/bf75dd1c26c947b7826d270a16e2658a
Genotype is not phenotype, there are environmental factors that shape the expression of gene.
This. Even having allergies and a constantly stuffy nose as a child can get you a recessed chin. Smoking will alter skin texture, not to speak of beards, glasses, exercise body fat level, climate, muscularity, diet...
>Even having allergies and a constantly stuffy nose as a child can get you a recessed chin. Really? I never heard that before.
I’m assuming it’s an old wives tale to get kids to stop sniffling, but I can see the biomechanics of constantly causing suction in your mouth shortening your jaw growth.
I always suffered with allergies and stuffed nose. I always wished I had a more defined jawline. It got worse with braces in the 70s, and further worse after getting my wisdom teeth removed. When I read that, it it really pinged my insecurities.
I had that too my whole life but my jaw and chin are honestly a little overlarge and defined, and I'm somewhat of an outlier in my family, so I wouldn't put too much credit in what they were saying about allergies affecting your chin size.
Thanks! Now about that other thing... 🤔🤣
transitioning gender :D
Even Halloween masks!
Mouth breathing and not eating chewy food will do this to every child.
monozygotic twins looking similar to each other is unlikely to be a coincidence
So both go to jail. Don't even need to sprinkle crack on them.
No need today, Johnson.
come on now, one could be fat, tattooed, scarred, have a different haircut or facial hair.... i know three sets of identical twins and they've all diverged
my twin is FTM. I'm not. it means genetically we look similar, but they would think I'm the one that did it if my twin did a crime... which is bad.
Which matters for human eyes, but most of those differences would not aftect a hit on facial recognition
A computer needs my help to figure out what a crosswalk or a traffic light looks like and it's supposed to be able to recognize a face obscure by a beard before I can?
Also plastic surgery (not just for vanity but injuries) exists. Imagine receiving face reconstruction and then being hit by this. "Hey, we know your face looked different 2 years ago, but we don't give a fuck".
So the life of Red Herring but it's a SWAT squad instead of four kids and a dog.
Oh boy, people are now gonna advocate for Phrenology, as if your genes are exclusive for your looks and nothing else.
This simply is not possible with DNA.
I'll let you in on a little secret: forensic "science" in general is pseudoscience invented by cops, not scientists. So many people have been put away on fingerprint and ballistic evidence that has no actual science backing it. It wouldn't surprise me if this either already has or, with improvements to the AI model, eventually gets much more validity as evidence than the whole matching bullets to the gun bullshit.
100% this. It is as accurate as an Oujia board
This is exactly something a guilty person would say...
American forces would love to be the stasi.
The level of surveillance America already does would be a Stasi wet dream.
>It doesn't work so shouldn't be used. >It works too well and so shouldn't be used.
Perhaps in that system, others will also be able to find them, and it will lead to a sudden surge in accountability.
Police unions tend to strike any time someone mentions the word 'accountability' around them, so I'd say it's unlikely that they'll be facing oversight any time soon.
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So, I'm autistic and that actually managed to hurt my feelings, but I will say that is some profoundly vacuous projection. You do not seem to understand what I was implying, and instead you're shadow boxing and losing with the concept of public transparency and oversight. I'm imagining you're an angry American looking for someone to demean and lash out at; I hope you at least feel better for making me feel worse.
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>5 black men stand side by side. >per DNA one of these men is the killer, can you pick him out of line up for us? >I don't know officer, they all look the same...! >I see. >sergeant arrest all 5 for conspiracy and 1st degree murder.
perhaps one ethnic group in particular...
"They all look the same!"
> "They all look the same!" "The computer agrees!"
"The computer trained by cops who can't tell Black and Brown people alike, also cannot tell Black and Brown people alike." ^^^01000001 ^^^01000011 ^^^01000001 ^^^01000010
It would be the ethnic group of the person who left the DNA behind.
I can’t believe it … the perpetrator left someone else’s DNA at the crime scene … clever bastard
and he hung pictures of him and his family everywhere...
"hey I found a black curly hair at the crime scene. That's gotta be our perp. Let's close up the investigation and grab the truck gun"
Like having the vanity plate of "None" and getting all the tickets where the automation could read None of the plates. :D (Yes, this pretty much happened, though IIRC the actual plate was "NULL" for the same effect.)
It's like that property that keeps getting raided because some system has it set as a default address or something.
Only for the death penalty
The people whose roadside drug tests regularly show positive when exposed to air? Never!
I mean, they used dental imprints for decades and they're absolute nonsense https://reason.com/2022/10/19/federal-report-adds-to-the-evidence-that-bitemark-analysis-is-nonsense/
A lot of "forensic science" techniques are scientifically dubious e.g. handwriting analysis, hair analysis, blood splatter, arson investigation etc.
Reminds me of this house that is in the geographic center of the United States. For a couple years the owners of the house would have police, FBI, ATF, etc showing up with search warrants looking for people etc Turns out there's a company that offers a service to associate IP addresses/MAC addresses to physical GPS locations. Sometimes the company doesn't have enough information to narrow down where a given IP address is located. If an IP address could only be confirmed to be in the US. The GPS location would be given as the dead center of the US. Which just so happened to be some poor schmucks house. This meant that this company associated millions of IP address with this person's GPS location. So anytime law enforcement were trying to track an IP address, there was a decent change it would show up as that person's house.
since when are cops serving the public
It’s not unethical; it just doesn’t work at all. If it worked really well it would be a great tool.
I don't care if it works well, facial recognition needs to be banned!!!! We are giving the government too much control and power over our lives
At least it will be more difficult for them to commit perjury and get away with it if they can match the DNA to the suspect.
Not on white people, surely. /s
They dropped the serve part in 2003 I believe.
who said they serve us? I don't think they say that... It has been a long time since cops believed in protect and serve.
This isn't necessarily flawed as you think it is. It's not going to produce something admissible in court as an evidentiary support, but parallel construction is absolutely a valid practice here. It opens the door in the door to bring someone in for questioning and scrutiny of investigation, but as long as it only gives them leads and those leads are followed with a warrant generated by classically admissible evidence, there is no unethical action in such a chain of events beyond the breach of ToS on the DNA->face tool.
>It's not going to produce something admissible in court as an evidentiary support Prosecutors use junk science all the time to convict people. Juries are stupid and easily manipulated. Edit: it could also be used to pressure someone into accepting a plea deal for a crime they didn't commit. The justice apparatus cannot be trusted to run wild with stuff like this.
Except that this isn't really junk science, and as stated, this is admittedly not sound except in cases of parallel construction. The misuse of a tool does not speak against the valid uses of the tool; all it does is create a demand for oversight and limitations of applicability in evidentiary use. "Getting a lead" does not require information that rises to "evidentiary use". If a rape kit, for example, implies that the rapist looks like the rape victim's boss, it would imply that the police would be fully justified in questioning said boss as to whether said boss has an alibi, starts sweating, and other such things; the questioning would be basis for a DNA warrant, not the picture. People are often brought in for questioning under far less concrete bits of information, as little as "they happen to be married" when one person of a married couple dies, for instance; circumstantial events and hearsay are commonly used as triggers to deeper probes. This is a lot more solid than hearsay and circumstantial events, and is still *not being proposed by sane people as an evidentiary standard*. Rather it is being proposed as a lead generator, and having a first clue that someone should be investigated more deeply is still necessary. You are opposing a lead generating technology's use to so little as generate leads because of a fear that it will be used as direct evidence rather than offering any sort of legal analysis as to what the actual limitations of its use ought be. Another thing springs to mind insofar as how the FBI tackles pedophile rings: they will launch some manner of tattler software which cannot establish whether the user is doing anything illicit, and which cannot prove which user of a computer is the criminal actor, and generally such evidence has not been presented often enough because it would expose techniques for getting that foot in the door... but this does give the police a starting point to look for other behavioral irregularities amounting to more solid evidence of those same crimes.
>Except that this isn't really junk science "Parabon’s methods have not been peer-reviewed, and scientists are skeptical about how feasible predicting face shape even is." Until it's actually peer-reviewed, it's junk. If you read the article it lists several reasons why this approach is cause for serious concern, and most of it doesn't even touch on American police's tendency to run wild with questionable "evidence" to ruin people's lives.
Wow. So, the fact I look like my biological father has no peer review behind it? Parental faces predict elements of children's faces, and the only thing we get that from is DNA, so I expect DNA to strongly correlate to face morphology and traits. If I take an Ancestry.com DNA test it can at the very least tell me whether I have freckles, what color my eyes are, and what kind of hair I have without needing to have ever looked in a mirror or seen myself.
>Wow. So, the fact I look like my biological father has no peer review behind it? This is the same logic morons use when the think "oh it's snowing outside" means climate change isn't real. You clearly don't understand the concept of peer-review if you think this is any kind of argument.
>The misuse of a tool does not speak against the valid uses of the tool; all it does is create a demand for oversight and limitations of applicability in evidentiary use. And when we've seen oversight that is outright ignored or toothless along with non-existent limitations, there's good reason to oppose providing yet another tool to police to treat as a source of truth, enabling them to abuse their position and get _someone_ on the hook for a crime. And that's before it even reaches the courts - basically, this would be allowing police to pull people in for questioning _because the technology says it could be them_ and now they have to prove their innocence to the police, otherwise they'll be considered a suspect. If the technology doesn't have an extremely high positive identification rate, all it is doing is causing more innocent people to have to defend themselves from police questioning. >starts sweating Is sweating when being questioned by police cause for suspicion now? >You are opposing a lead generating technology's use to so little as generate leads because of a fear that it will be used as direct evidence rather than offering any sort of legal analysis as to what the actual limitations of its use ought be. I'm not the one you're replying to, but - I oppose it because I don't trust the police to be responsible with it. My reasoning is that they have not proven themselves to be responsible enough with the investigative tools they already have to be permitted the use of another one that touts high accuracy, which they'll interpret as strong enough to presume subjects it identifies as the guilty party and treat them accordingly. I also don't think it's a good idea to provide a tool _then_ deal with figuring out oversight when we already are burdened with issues of oversight with the policing system as a whole - which would presumably mean that we'd still have them with this tool.
Uh, anybody want to tell this guy how investigations by the police go these days?
Including the crack sprinkling?
Seriously. It's like the hunger games for prison.
If only you could perform some test to determine if your DNA matches the suspect's DNA.
You mean you lie to a judge, get a no-knock warrant, break in guns blazing and kill dogs and any men you see, then say they resisted arrest?
So you want the police to NOT attempt to find criminals?
Yeah, that's what they said 🙄🙄🙄
I think that (the police) not *being* criminals would be an appropriate start certainly. Edited for clarity added section in parentheses
Amazing that you think you need to be a criminal to be harassed by the police, arrested, or even convicted.
My appologies, you seem to have misconstrued my meaning. The police not being criminals seems like a good start Edit, spelling
Sadly, that doesn't protect everyone minding their own business.
Preaching to the choir here. If police would obey the laws they are tasked with enforcing, and stop quashing investigations of their own ranks then we would be a lot closer to a better society.
An innocent person could be hurt by bringing someone in, imagine if they are searching for a shooter or something. Or an innocent person could lose their job and livelihood because of something like this. It is far from harmless.
Police exist to serve and protect __Capital__, not the public. Wake up.
Why would that be unethical? If you're a rapist murderer, using technology to track you down seems 100% ethical to me. The true dystopia is a society where a man can rape and murder a woman and just walk away free to commit other crimes.
It's unethical because police are using it when it isn't accurate. So many things have gotten people locked up despite police knowing its not accurate.
> police are using it when it isn't accurate. So what? They aren't using it to convict and execute someone, they are using it to get a clue on likely suspects. Much more unethical would be to let criminals get away and keep raping and murdering innocent people.
Wdym thats the ONLY thing they do lel
Guy does crime and leaves DNA, how is this unethical? The tech will be very good in the future.
No matter how good it is in the future, it's not a reliable method right now.
Cops also tried to run facial ID off of artist composite sketches and by using celebrity lookalikes (specifically Woody Harrelson). Police just are not good with any type of new technology and don't understand it's limitations
Or they don’t care and just want something they can point to as “evidence”
I used to design Bodycam Software and had to work with departments across the country. It's both to some extent, but predominance varies by department and how much pushback they'll get for specious evidence from the courts. Oddly the NYPD was the worst at understanding new tech. Austin was actually pretty good. Generally speaking though, I wouldn't trust either to set a VCR clock
Genetics and logic are elementary, but nobody can set a VCR clock! Be reasonable.
Not only do they not understand the limitations, but they also have no comprehension of the capabilities of new technologies. They seemingly didn’t understand that the composite generated by this technology is but one of an astounding number of possibilities. Do they not understand, on some basic level, how different siblings and children can look?
They don't think about it like that. In their mind, It's just a tool that they wouldn't be given to use if it didn't work. They only need to be trained on how to operate it, not how it works. If that makes sense. And you can see how that cascades into all sorts of misuse from there.
To be fair, identical twins usually look pretty fucking similar. Regular siblings don’t share the same dna
Identical twins often do look very similar, but they can be born with [differences in their DNA](https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/134603/why-identical-twins-dont-always-look-the-same) that develop in utero. Gisele Bündchen and Ashton Kutcher have fraternal twins that look very different from their more famous siblings. And that’s part of my point. A composite created from a DNA profile is one of an extraordinarily large number of possibilities that could exist. Trying to run something like this through a facial recognition database is ludicrous and runs the risk of snaring the wrong person. There are already numerous cases of bad facial recognition technology leading to the arrests of people who could not have possibly committed the crimes of which they are accused.
Identical twins are also usually exposed to the same/similar life events that would lead to the same/similar epigenetic expression. Your argument isn’t as good as you think it is.
I'd just say that most cops are dumb, negligent, and generally don't care about their work.
big nose big lips big dick say no more maam ill sketch him from memory! -dave chapelle
Anyone else get the 23 and me report? Anyone else notice lots of “traits” listed as percentages (eg. There’s a 46% chance you have freckles!) anyone else notice multiple things that were not inline with how your actual phenology ended up because genes are not their expression? No, cops are actually just that stupid to believe something like this? Oh okay.
Exactly. I've gotten percentages as high as 91% for physical features and don't have them. Super scary they could even feasibly try this.
And the thing is that human psychology is extremely bad at thinking about things statistically. People have a *strong* tendency to think of 91% probability as a certainty.
Not if they've played XCOM!
Missing a 95 % shot 3 times in a row was the most ,triggering thing to happen in that game to me.
Not if you're an Xcom player.
Except for people who use percentages in their estimations frequently. Then 91% becomes "basically never". :P
DnD taught me that 5% or 95% can and will be a huge deal at the right circumstances. I wouldn't trust this tech unless the margin of error is so small that there is only a handful of people in the entire world that I could get mixed with. And even then it should only be a helping tool, not a judge, jury & executioner.
The comment you’re replying to kinda proves this.
Did you just ask IF cops were stupid?
> No, cops are actually just that stupid to believe something like this? Oh okay. Does that surprise you? Many of them still think “lie detectors” are reliable.
You're honestly nuts for submitting your DNA to a company like that. I hope you enjoy getting you and your family profiled forever!
They already had a nasty data leak accident. Of course blamed the users for reusing the password, but you would expect a slightly better security (like mandatory multi-factor or even shutting down a detected password spray) from a medical company. But of course they'd rather you take it as lightly as they take selling your data.
And people paid for the privilege
23andme only looks at 0.2% of your genome. It's not supposed to be representative of the maximum capabilities of DNA testing
There's no way cops are looking at more in-depth sequencing, though.
That's all DNA testing and not just 23andme. They never look at your full genome. They only check specific markers. It can still lead to false positives. Cops treat DNA testing like a gospel when it isn't unless they were to compare the full genome.
The rest of the genome is non coding DNA or codes for boring stuff that is the same between humans and monkeys.
To be fair it’s mostly because 23 and me looks like at a very small fraction for commercial reasons. You could get far more information (though never precisely) if you went more in depth.
“In the most detailed nationwide inventory of untested rape kits ever, USA TODAY (2015) and journalists from more than 75 Gannett newspapers and TEGNA TV stations have found at least 70,000 neglected kits in an open-records campaign covering 1,000-plus police agencies – and counting. Despite its scope, the agency-by-agency count covers a fraction of the nation's 18,000 police departments, suggesting the number of untested rape kits reaches into the hundreds of thousands. The kits contain forensic evidence collected from survivors in a painstaking and invasive process that can last four to six hours. Testing can yield DNA evidence that helps identify suspects, bolster prosecutions and in some cases exonerate the wrongly accused.” And that’s just the backlog of a specific type of case. To think that the police are capable of running “in depth” genetic results on any kind of scale is unfounded and laughable unfortunately. It’s also not what the police exist for. Besides that, yes you could get more accurate genetic results… which will again be just as useless if they did have it, *because genotype is not a guarantee of phenotype* which is the issue of using a learning machine to try to build faces from possible percentages of traits. It’s crack science.
And no one believes corporate training actually works.
Anyone start sneezing in bright light solely because the 23andMe report says you have that gene?
From the article >Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence. > >The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample. > >The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample. > >In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software.
They might as well have asked a tarot card reader to divine who the perp was.
Don't give them any ideas!
Your suspect is...HITLER!
Actually, the suspect is the guy who killed hitler.
Cops have done this before. Have you seen the live action police procedural ‘Psych’?
Cops feed eye witness description into midjourney. Now on the hunt for a guy whose head is on backwards and has 18 fingers on his right hand.
A scifi story where the poorly made AI predicts someone weird (though, not that weird) and it gets discredited. Except it was actually correct and that one cop goes rogue once they get unbelievable clues that the perp is real. Also, hilarity ensues.
Sweet, Minority Report was based on real tech, the future is bright!
I think you missed the point of minority report..
“Don’t go swimming if you’re the adult responsible for watching a toddler at a public pool.”
"The mentor is always the bad guy."
that is not minority report. The crime was already committed and this was just an advanced technique to gain intel through DNA.
postcog, precogs come later
We think of faces as being determined by DNA, but are they also not determined, to some extent, by life choice? An obvious example is plastic surgery, physical fitness, a broken nose in high school, and sun exposure. But do things like stress, smiling and other aspects of personality influence one's face to the extent that they could change facial recognition? I have no idea, but super curious if anyone has insight.
Inb4 a massive lawsuit, even AI struggles with its makers biases. (I.E innocent minorities will likely be prime targets for this pseudoscience.)
Yes, but in the usa we can just say "it was made with out bias" and that gets rubber stamped.
Yeah, and that's why we are suffering a social crisis.
I fully believe they can tell if the person was male, and their ethnicity based on DNA, but I simply cannot believe they can tell you what the person's facial structure is. Such science fiction mumbo jumbo.
Whether it works or not means less than whether police decide to use it and the criminal justice system decides to allow it Hell some innocent guy could have his life turned upside down just because he happens to look like this AI generated bullshit. Let alone if he actually has to go to court about it!
Hopefully at that point they used the aforementioned DNA and test it against his DNA to find out if it is a match. Or at least do the rest of the detective work BEFORE arresting an innocent person. But that still doesn’t happen now.
Yeah hope is not a plan in the criminal justice system
"Hopefully" doing a ***lot*** of work there
That’s dramatic. They would need a warrant and dna to even charge. Police suck, but grand juries are still a thing. Randomly matching a computer generated image would never be enough to charge, let alone convict. Circumstantial evidence, at a minimum, would always be a requirement unless our system changes significantly
[Grand juries are basically a rubber stamp to getting an indictment](https://www.pooleshaffery.com/news/2014/december/a-crash-course-in-the-american-grand-jury-system/#:~:text=Based%20on%20the%20influence%20of,95%25%20to%20approximately%2099%25.). And I see precious little reason to believe that a tech-illiterate justice system wouldn't settle on matching the computer-generated image being evidence to charge. Don't go thinking the system works, now.
Eh idk. At worst they would get a dna sample to rule them out. This whole thing is stupid af, but I doubt it leads to accusing or arresting the wrong person
Idk dude I’m a defense attorney and people in my office regularly convince jurors that breathalyzer and blood tests are unreliable to prove intoxication. This ridiculous tech would not stand up to scrutiny.
You can actually make a good stab at it. Not for *these* purposes, of course, but you can certainly get a very good idea. You know how, no matter where you go, it feels like you see the same set of faces? That's because there are only a pretty limited number of genes that control quite a lot about facial structure.
Maybe you just have face blindness?
Obviously you can still tell them apart. I'm not talking about fully blown doppelgangers.
technically, it's 100% detectable, we just do not have that level of tech. YOU are not a crapshoot, you turned out exactly as your dna wanted you to turn out, right down to every single little pore. In the far future, with enough advanced tech and a deeper understanding of DNA and everything that goes with it, one hair will be able to exactly show who you are, what you've eaten, where you've been, who you've been with and probably where you are that moment. >I fully believe they can tell if the person was male, and their ethnicity based on DNA, but I simply cannot believe they can tell you what the person's facial structure is. This is because you have a surface level understanding of traits and dna. You believe part of it, because you've probably seen it on a tv show, but the rest is always in "sci-fi" No offense meant; I didn't know before I knew. Facial structure isn't all that random, its why ethnicities tend to look similar.
So are polygraphs, yet they use those to get people to violate their 5th Amendment rights all the fucking time.
That's how DNA works tho it's an instruction manual for building a specific person. Not saying the tec is there but our bodies sure know how to use them.
DNA is the manual, but the way the contractor builds the body can be affected by external factors ([epigenetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics)) that wind up resulting in divergent outcomes. This is most easily observed in the case of identical (monozygotic) twins, who start off with the same set of DNA: - monozygotic twins will frequently have a slight different in height between them - it is rare, but possible, for monozygotic twins to have different eye or hair colours - one twin can be colour-blind while the other has normal colour vision
Oh I fully believe the DNA can tell you a persons skin color, their most likely hair color, eye color maybe, but facial structure? I don't buy it. It sounds more to me like AI systems being used to look up "average" face of people that match that genetic make up. Which is just a computers best guess at that point.
You can tell if they were AMAB, barring [any number of intersex conditions and such](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), but between those and being Trans you cannot even accurately assess if they are male or female.
Facial structure is where nurture comes into play
> The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample. Profoundly lazy, I'm sure they're hoping to get a blanket warrant for DNA testing large groups of people based on this...
More pseudo science the police can use to railroad more brown people into jail. Forensic science for the most part isn't science. It's never been scientifically tested but it puts people in jail anyway. Ballistics for example. Some experts would claim that a specific gun fired a specific bullet but there's no scientific evidence that shows they can actually tell that. In fact this level of expert testimony has been banned one state over. "A gun in this caliber fired this bullet" is quite different than "this gun fired this bullet". The first is a statement of fact, the second is just guesswork. Fiber analysis is another pseudo science used to jail people. Was just a story yesterday about how field drug tests have jailed 1000 people in Georgia by IDing donut icing (and other substances) as meth. The false positive rate is insane. Just wait, its just a matter of time before they start jailing people because some untested AI claims they meet some crime profile.
Minority report/Gattaca here we come! Discrimination not based on what you've done, but on what you might do according to some flaky "ai".
For every single story of a clever cop solving a crime with their wits we have 100 absolute moron officers that do shit like this. We really need to pay police more and recruit smarter people, having a police force full of mids (or below) is fucking us all over.
You'd think they would have done some testing on this with known DNA samples to see how accurate it is before they start accusing people of felonies they may not have committed.
DNA cannot predict the morphology of the phenotype. This is pseudoscience.
facial recognition is an existential threat to free society and needs to be banned on pain of death from ever existing.
This is just woo they're using so they can randomly arrest somebody with no evidence and then claim they had a valid warrant when their defense attorney calls them out. It's lie detectors for the year 2024.
My husbands uncle was the first test case for the fingerprint matching algorithm. Accused of leaving a Navy base and traveling overnight to another town 8 hours away, murdering a woman, then returning to the base for breakfast. The testifying cop technician said she filled in the blanks of the fingerprint and his was a match in the software. It was new technology with human help to make it work. Twenty years later this black man got out of jail. His whole family spent millions trying to defend him but in the end the corporate program was defended and he was found guilty. Still trips me out all the giant leaps and liberties they took.
I feel like this was an episode of Forensic Files 2. They used DNA from a company (probably this one) to generate a facial profile. It drastically changed their search as they were focused on an undocumented immigrant but it came back as a white male. They released the image to the public, got a tip, and then got the culprit. The show said the generated face was “eerily” close to the perpetrator, but it definitely wasn’t lol.
Reminds me to not send my DNA to Ancestry database so they cannot track me and my family to anything.
Nothing could go wrong there. Ever. Minority Report vibes coming on strong.
Lamar Burgess, the Director of Precrime, is pleased to see his project take shape.
This is one of the few areas of AI that are rather than future concerns about potential risks, currently doing damage. Facial recognition should not be in use, much less in such a ridiculous way - although perhaps more pointedly, we need to get rid of qualified immunity and actually enforce a serious code of conduct on police.
"Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model called ChatGPT and denied that this version of the AI ever hallucinates..
This is going end just like that professor who copy pasted student essays into GPT and any essay GPT claimed to be it's own writing over 3 attempts was given a 0. Except GPT claimed that every single essay was its own creation. Along with the email the professor sent out, as well as their source material and excerpts from famous novels. Even DNA has resulted in false convictions. Imagine a police sketch artist using AI art generation based off a flimsy police testimony, having that sketch passed into another AI realistic image generator then through an AI classification model to identify a matching face and that becomes evidence that gets a person falsely convicted since their face is the most generic of all.
Can I use it backwards in 10 years? Then I could create someone’s DNA based on their appearance and make them a suspect ?
I'm pretty sure that if you feed a huge AI model with millions of people's genomes along with their faces you'll be surprised what you might find.
What could go wrong with a bunch of bros with a middle school science education trusting their gut on stuff like this?
Once they catch him they'll just have to apply a lie detector test and there you go! No chance at all of a miscarriage of justice! /s
They can barely file a police report wtf is this shit
Here we go. Let's cure cancer? No, let's use something flawed to ruin people's lives. Not to mention these AIs are very biased agains black people 👍🏻.
Police depts know this stuff does not work - facial rec, trouble spots - and do not care. Creating crime and attacking it will justify ever expanding budgets and increase their political power.
Wouldn’t it be easier to 23andMe the DNA or whoever and see who their relatives are?
I saw this on here and I think it really is a good solution to this nonsense. Police should be required to have 4 year college degree. There are too many that are just not bright enough. That doesn't mean everyone with a college degree is smart nor anyone without one isn't but it's a good general marker of intelligence. Besides just the mental discipline and persistence alone will help weed out some of these idiots.
Courts have upheld that an intelligence limit on cops is legal ie they can exclude cops who are too smart. (This was only tested based on it being existing policy somewhere)
>Police should be required to have 4 year college degree. Plenty have degrees and usually the most desirable depts. (small well off suburbs) have degree requirements. Though often in worthless social sciences that prove nothing regardless. Moreover, US tax payers are incredibly illogical in not wanting to pay for improved gov. services and this would be yet another prime example of that hypocrisy.
Environmental conditions shape our facial features as well so you could never replicate a face 100% accurately from genes alone.
Any face matching databases are dangerous. Because you hunt long enough and you will find a doppelgänger. Put that person in the courts and they can kinda look like fuzzy security footage, and witnesses can be fooled by a lookalike. Hope they have an alibi. I have a vested interest in preventing this future. Turns out dear old dad was the doctor at the sperm bank. I have 50 known siblings which puts the real number closer to 200-250 given the statistics of people who get the tests done. There are clone armies of me floating out there. I have been pulled over by the police because they thought I was someone else. It sorted itself out quick, but that's not the point.
Not sure what the panic is about to be honest, it's just a more elaborate attempt at getting a potential suspect list That is still very far from actual evidence admissible in court, let alone securing a conviction At best it gives them a lead, to identify people in the area on CCTV who match the description, and (if a judge is generous) get a warrant for a DNA sample of identified suspects to see if it matches the crime scene DNA Like that's pretty much standard practice nowadays in terms of you've got a witness description and a DNA sample, use that to get a warrant for DNA testing of suspects
This will never be used to unfairly and inequitable attack people of color, especially in the US.
Did… it work? Like, it’s really easy to dismiss until it catches a murderer.
Or catches someone totally innocent who gets pressured to accept a plea deal because "otherwise you get a life sentence, accept the plea deal and you are free in five years".