Thread

1. freddealmeida · 1790398947 · focus · HN ↗

   Flock did not put the woman in jail. The police and DA put her in Jail. This is not a failure of the technology (do they have confidence levels?). This is a failure of how police are outsourcing their reasoning and decision making to an AI camera service that seems to fail at the tail.

   1. CrendKing · 1790401755 · focus · HN ↗

      But Flock gives police overconfidence to commit actions instead of having due diligence. It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.

      This is also comparable to self-driving car: Waymo's system has achieve the level of "less error than human on average" long time ago, but they are still only doing slow expansion. Why? Because when AI is involved, human naturally expect them to be almost 100% correct, not just barely better than human, otherwise why bother use AI (and all the troubles to legalize for AI) in the first place? So in this case, I guess the police just blindly trust the AI being 99.99% correct.

      1. vconnor · 1790402118 · focus · HN ↗

         > It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.

         Yes, but it is still your fault. “I am dumb and I was deceived” is no valid defense, least of all for a police officer.

         1. CrendKing · 1790403387 · focus · HN ↗

            I'm not saying the police has no fault. Using AI assist without secondary verification is never good idea, at least not in 2026. But you can't argue Flock the technology itself, and especially Flock the company, are totally innocent, just like you can't say the "guns are just tools like hammer, it only depends on who uses them", and the gun industry.

            1. mdp2021 · 1790409595 · focus · HN ↗

               > the police has no fault

               Gross lack of due diligence: it has full fault.

               Untrained officials: graver systemic fault.

               > company, are totally innocent

               How clear is the uncertainty of the output?

               1. krisoft · 1790421845 · focus · HN ↗

                  > How clear is the uncertainty of the output?

                  It is not even clear from the article that there were anything wrong with the output. She has a car of that make. And it doesnt appear to be in dispute that she drove nearby.

                  It simply is the case that “being nearby” in itself is not enough evidence that you were involved in a crash. Especially when the colour doesn’t match and the vehicle is not damaged.

                  1. LorenPechtel · 1790522334 · focus · HN ↗

                     The fundamental problem here is that the police are very bad about false positives. Flock gives them a ton of data--but that doesn't make it magically perfect. No surprise there was a similar car nearby--there are a lot of similar cars. Flock shows them the similar cars and they pick the closest without any investigation.

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