School security AI flagged clarinet as a gun. Exec says it wasn't an error

34 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by kyrofa
(arstechnica.com)

28 Comments

greatgib

9 hours ago

"Along similar lines, Seminole County Public Schools (SCPS) communications officer, Katherine Crnkovich, emphasized in an email to Ars to “please make sure it is noted that this student wasn’t simply carrying a clarinet. This individual was holding it as if it were a weapon.”

I don't know if this communication officer realize the ridicule of her statement.

general1465

7 hours ago

Like blaming a girl that she dressed in a wrong way and thus she was assaulted.

RaftPeople

7 hours ago

> This individual was holding it as if it were a weapon

When asked to clarify the communications officer provided the following evidence:

"As you can see in this image the student is squinting a little bit, exactly what you would do if you were aiming."

"Also, you can see by his stance that he is trying to create stability with one foot a little forward."

"I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was actually a trial run and he is testing the AI for weaknesses."

rolph

4 hours ago

so much of this seems to have nothing to do with what is being held, it looks like gait and posture analysis, and guess what you do with instruments? you assemble them hold them to your eye to look at the alignment of the sections, and you sight through the holecover to look for gaps in the pads.

i believe it might be possible to trigger an alert with empty hands, based on analysis, as well as telescopes, maybe guitars, science class projects such as sextants, trigonometry exercises for those rare birds that do practical math lessons.

really the student manual should specify which gestures, and postures are prohibited AI triggers, akin to pulling a fire alam.

is drama or theatre still a thing in high school? that seems like a major issue there.

at the risk of repeating myself, if school is that dangerous, why are we sending children there?

mcphage

6 hours ago

So I guess the Cardboard Tube Samurai was a prophesy?

Spivak

9 hours ago

I mean these students now have the absolute funniest and most effective way to protest this bullshit. They could do more musical instruments, but I think bringing in comically fake depictions of outlandish weaponry would be legendary. A cereal box that just has the letters C4 written on it, an old timey cartoon bomb, a papier-mâché nuclear warhead.

goosejuice

8 hours ago

Or just a Doritos bag apparently.

mcphage

6 hours ago

Sir, please drop that bag of Flamin Hot Cool Ranch chips and place your hands where I can see them

yunohn

5 hours ago

Sadly this form of protest would quickly end with trigger happy cops shooting innocent kids…

GuestFAUniverse

6 hours ago

Thank your MAGAs. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/10/31/1209683...

Insanity. That isn't "denial of a problem", or a tendency anymore. _One order of magnitude_ worse than any western civilization.

Other countries have "wake up calls" and act accordingly.

Still, close to every US blockbuster movie "solves" problems with guns. That's cynical, considering the real world suffering.

grugagag

9 hours ago

This software is expensive and incompetent. Such blunders are expensive, think of the dispatched officers, the highly disturbed school and so on. Such false positives should be heavily penalized such that the companies providing the service are incentivized to fix their systems. The officials claiming the software worked as needed are probably benefitting from these contracts.

auscompgeek

40 minutes ago

At the very least schools should be billed for the frivolous police callouts. Who knows, maybe then the school might change their tune.

kylehotchkiss

8 hours ago

We could metal detect and bag check at the doors, or we can pay a ton of money for a vision based system… what is with Americans fixations on cameras as the technical solution to every real world problem?

Gun detection is a solved problem. Even shopping malls and hotels in developing countries get this right.

rolph

3 hours ago

watch out for the students that have chemistry, and shop classes, they might just build a flintlock inside the school.

in my youth a number of fellow students constructed miniature crossbows, utilizing things issued by the school, and pilfered from the building. they could penetrate office dividers, and were tipped with exacto blades ! it was a badge of how "cool" you were.

saulpw

8 hours ago

Metal detection and bag checking requires a human at the entrance. With a camera you can automate the human away (at some cost to reliability and reasonability).

pants2

6 hours ago

It's pretty sad that we've come to this. What if we had nothing? Instead of treating students like criminals we treat them like complex humans and put the money into providing support and welfare for students?

My dad was in the gun club at his high school and brought a rifle to class regularly. It was fine. Guns aren't the problem.

wkjagt

5 hours ago

> Guns aren't the problem

Maybe not the whole problem but surely part of it?

asimovaQs

4 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...

Postwar kids, now in corporate and political leadership, were raised in a more militant, religious society.

Society is still shedding the paranoia and codependency they observed and have locked away in their neural networks.

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

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105

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

It's not the media itself causing mental health crisis but the militant policing and guilt trips at non-conformism

Financial engineering is being used the same way; keeping the next generation poor because they don't want to kowtow to a rich elder.

suprjami

5 hours ago

I'm gonna give the AI a pass on this one.

Student was intentionally dressed in military camo as part of a dress up.

The camera is probably grainy garbage at poor angle.

It's a reasonable assessment, probably a human being would double take in the same situation.

The problem is not having a human check the AI alert before locking down the school.

The problem is having a society where people regularly take guns into schools and public places and commit mass murder.

rdiddly

9 hours ago

Apparently school didn't already suck enough, and needed to suck more. With each passing year it's more and more like prison.

techblueberry

9 hours ago

“school resource officers, security directors and superintendents consistently ask us to be proactive and forward them an alert if there is any fraction of a doubt that the threat might be real.”

Jesus

Spivak

9 hours ago

So they want them to send them an alert when there's a doubt that the threat is real? Company needs a better comms officer.

metalman

7 hours ago

the experiential divide between home and and ,prison schooling , is well, just that

yunohn

4 hours ago

This is absolutely ridiculous and insane. I feel deep sadness for what children these days are being put through, by scammy tech companies and the infamous NRA at the same time.

The cherry on top is that they refuse to provide statistics on their technology - something I assumed would’ve been table stakes to propagate it nation wide. And yet, the USA still has deadly school shootings on a weekly basis…

krapp

4 hours ago

>And yet, the USA still has deadly school shootings on a weekly basis…

It's simply the price we have to pay to live in the only truly free nation in the world. Tyranny can't happen here because our government cowers in fear of America's militias and its armed populace.

luqtas

9 hours ago

are humans adopting AI on their daily basis, hallucinating? stories at 11