Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There was this one incident in China where the facial recognition system mistaked the face of a chinese celebrity on a bus for a jaywalker... so the system isn't perfect for special conditions/environments yet. However I do believe that results today are already outstanding and will only get better.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/22/18107885/china-facial-re... https://you.com/search?q=facial+recognition+in+china



Funny you should say that. In another post I compared sitting congressmen to convicted felons

- 440 images of congressmen

- 1,756 mugshots

- 10 mismatches (?) with 70+% certainty

The highest was 86%, but to be fair, I wouldn't be able to tell you confidently for all of them that the convicts aren't the same person. And under 80% should be suspect anyway. It's just that you need to use the right statistical methods when comparing a person to a large pool because you'll have spurious matches.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/how-facial-recognition-w...


> under 80% should be suspect anyway

This attitude disturbs me more than any other single aspect of the mass idiocy around adopting AI for critical things. 80% is horribly low accuracy for anything even remotely important.

For example, imagine you went to a store and could tell the cashier any price for anything so long as it was 80% accurate, as in, 80% of the original price. Just a 20% potential discount, nbd.

Or put another way, 80% of your items had to have a perfectly accurate price but you bought 5 items, 1 of them was a PlayStation 5 you priced at $1. It's fine. The rest were accurate!

80% is extremely low accuracy. It's absurd to think that's a good level to cut things off. We should demand systems like these demonstrate 99% or better accuracy. Until then they should be illegal to apply in any scenario where a decision is made about another person.


Wow, the more insane story to me here is that they flash your face, name, and ID number on a public screen if you're caught jaywalking. How dystopian.


If public shaming like that was attempted in the US, I imagine in some circles it would become a goal to repost on social media a photo of yourself on the system jaywalking. Probably holding a sign with some meme.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: