It's annoying that both articles are calling this AI error. This was human error, the police did the wrong thing and the people of Fargo will end up paying for this fuckup.
I hate this headline (not blaming submitter). Police incompetence and negligence jailed her for months and left her stranded in a North Dakota winter. The AI is no more responsible than the cars and airplanes they used.
Edit: this is in reference to the original headline "AI error jails innocent grandmother for months in North Dakota fraud case" not the revised title that it was changed to.
Completely infuriating, but more of a commentary on the sad state of incompetent power-hungry law enforcement with tools they don't know how to use than the tools themselves.
Though, the question remains: are the tools built in such a way as to deceive the user into a false sense of trust or certainty?
There's no way this isn't a slam dunk case to sue the piss out of the Fargo Police, probably the US Marshals and maybe other orgs. The woman in the surveillance phone clearly looks way younger, among the many other obvious signs this woman didn't do it. I hope she wrings at least several million dollars out of the government.
It’s obvious from the one photo they posted of the actual suspect that the lady they arrested is about 20-30 years older than the woman in the bank photo. The woman in the photo is maybe 25-30 years old, this grandma looks like she’s 65-70 (actual age of 50).
Absolutely ridiculous, I hope she wins her civil case.
It is an AI error, but also an error on the part of the cops, the prosecutors, the judge, and the county sheriff (who is responsible for the jail inmates). I hope everyone involved in this travesty is sued into oblivion and unable to hide behind their immunity defenses. Facial recognition should never be the sole basis for a warrant.
Wait - what was the AI tool and how did it have her face to begin with? If small-town police are doing face-matching searches across national databases then nobody is safe because the number of false positives is going to be MASSIVE by sheer number of people being searched every day.
Pretend the tool is 99.999999% specific. If it searches every face in the USA you're still getting about 3 false positives PER SEARCH.
You will never have a criminal AI tool safe enough to apply at a national scale.
> 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.
> Once they were in hand, Fargo police met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had already been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time police interviewed her.
How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it. And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.
There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people. Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman, maybe we should look instead at the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility, and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.
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?"
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog.
Fargo police say the bank fraud case is still under investigation and no arrests have been made.
It's not an AI error. It's a human error in mis-using AI in this way. Saying it's an AI error is like saying a hole in your drywall is a hammer error.
Unfortunately we'll probably see a trend of people using AI and then blaming AI for cases where they mis-used AI in roles it's not good for or failed to review or monitor the AI.
I read the article and I don’t really understand… she was held in a jail in Tennessee but the article states they flew her to North Dakota? And somehow she’s a fugitive so that’s why she doesn’t get bail? but she’s a fugitive held in her own state in a holding facility? But then when they release her, she’s in North Dakota? So if some state says you’re a fugitive your home state will just hold you in jail until they come and put you on an airplane? Is that correct?
We are rapidly becoming a world where every person is one inscrutable LLM decision from having their life ruined with no recourse.
This type of incident isn't new and is only going to get worse. The problem is our governments are doing absolutely nothing about it. I'll give two examples:
1. Hertz implemented a system where they falsely reported cars as being stolen. People were arrested and went to jail for rental cars that were sitting in the Hertz lot. Hertz ultimately had to pay $168 million in a settlement [1]. That's insufficient. If I, as an ordinary citizen, make a false police report that somebody stole my car I can be criminally charged. And rightly so. People should go to jail for this and it will continue until they do. These fines and settlements are just the cost of doing business; and
2. The UK government contracted Fujitsu to produce a new system for their post offices. That system was allowed to produce criminal charges for fraud that were completely false. People committed suicide over this. This went on for what? A decade or more? But resuted in a parliamentary inquiry and settlements. It's known as the British Post Office scandal [2]. Again, people should go to jail for this.
The choice we as a society face is whether to have automation improve all of our lives by raising everyone's standard of living and allowing us to do less work and less menial work or do we allow automation to further suppress wages so the Epstein class can be slightly more wealthy.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 91.6 ms ] thread> Her bank records showed she was more than 1,200 miles away, at home in Tennessee at the same time police claimed she was in Fargo committing fraud.
> Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/12/tennessee-gr... - Another article on this without a paywall.
It's annoying that both articles are calling this AI error. This was human error, the police did the wrong thing and the people of Fargo will end up paying for this fuckup.
Edit: this is in reference to the original headline "AI error jails innocent grandmother for months in North Dakota fraud case" not the revised title that it was changed to.
Though, the question remains: 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.
Absolutely ridiculous, I hope she wins her civil case.
Also me, reading further: Uh-oh.
The chief of police also resigned today; wouldn't be shocked if this was part of the reasoning.
Pretend the tool is 99.999999% specific. If it searches every face in the USA you're still getting about 3 false positives PER SEARCH.
You will never have a criminal AI tool safe enough to apply at a national scale.
> Once they were in hand, Fargo police met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had already been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time police interviewed her.
How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it. And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.
There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people. Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman, maybe we should look instead at the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility, and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.
It says she was misidentified using facial recognition.
That’s exactly what happened
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.
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.
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.
I smell a lawsuit
Unfortunately we'll probably see a trend of people using AI and then blaming AI for cases where they mis-used AI in roles it's not good for or failed to review or monitor the AI.
https://nob.cs.ucdavis.edu/classes/ecs153-2019-04/readings/c...
This type of incident isn't new and is only going to get worse. The problem is our governments are doing absolutely nothing about it. I'll give two examples:
1. Hertz implemented a system where they falsely reported cars as being stolen. People were arrested and went to jail for rental cars that were sitting in the Hertz lot. Hertz ultimately had to pay $168 million in a settlement [1]. That's insufficient. If I, as an ordinary citizen, make a false police report that somebody stole my car I can be criminally charged. And rightly so. People should go to jail for this and it will continue until they do. These fines and settlements are just the cost of doing business; and
2. The UK government contracted Fujitsu to produce a new system for their post offices. That system was allowed to produce criminal charges for fraud that were completely false. People committed suicide over this. This went on for what? A decade or more? But resuted in a parliamentary inquiry and settlements. It's known as the British Post Office scandal [2]. Again, people should go to jail for this.
The choice we as a society face is whether to have automation improve all of our lives by raising everyone's standard of living and allowing us to do less work and less menial work or do we allow automation to further suppress wages so the Epstein class can be slightly more wealthy.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal