How accurate does an AI system need to be?

The injured teenage survivor of a January 2025 shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee high school recently sued the manufacturer of an “AI gun detection” system that failed to detect the handgun that left two dead, including the shooter.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Davidson County court last month, the security company Omnilert either knew or should have known that there were “significant operational limitations in its gun detection system that could result in detection failures during actual emergencies, including limitations based on camera placement, proximity of the weapon to camera sensors, camera angle, lighting, and weapon visibility.”

Omnilert cofounder Ara Bagdasarian declined Ars’ invitation to answer questions about the lawsuit. System Integrations, the other defendant in the case, which resold the Omnilert system, also did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

  • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    2 hours ago

    Do you think LLMs are being used for this sort of thing?

    Yes. It took all of five seconds to find out too.

    No, datacentres are not being used for real-time gun detection

    You’ve already been wrong once, care to try for two?

    • Wispy2891@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Using a LLM for detecting a specific object on an image is possible but stupid: if your object is always the same (like in this case) it’s several orders of magnitude cheaper to train once on that specific object then use the computer vision model running directly on the local server that’s recording the video.

      Otherwise:

      1. the api costs would be colossal, 0.001$ per each image, at 30 fps it’s $100 per hour, nobody would pay that
      2. The detection latency would be several seconds vs almost instant
      3. Without internet connection the system wouldn’t work

      Use cases for LLM-based image recognition is if the object changes at every request or it’s ultra specific with brands and colors

      • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        1 hour ago

        if your object is always the same (like in this case)

        It isn’t the same though. A large gauge shotgun and a small gauge pistol are pretty different looking. Compare those to a .22 rifle with a scope, and those to a decked out ar15. That’s a lot of different always the sames. What if it’s a revolver? Or has a folded stock? Or a sawed off stock? Will it recognize a derringer or a mac10 with a large capacity mag as guns?

        We can because they make us dead. We have valid reason to fear them which is a great motivator for most species to learn to recognize the danger. You’d still recognize a ring gun as a gun, without getting specifically trained to do so a machine will identify it as jewelry.