Given the shutdown/attack today, which targeted stations far from the capital, this, ah… did not go well.
Excerpts from article:
Security measures in Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to crawl CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats.
After training its algorithms on both open source and synthetic data, Wintics’ systems have been adapted to, for example, count the number of people in a crowd or the number of people falling to the floor—alerting operators once the number exceeds a certain threshold.
Houllier argues that his algorithms are a privacy-friendly alternative to controversial facial recognition systems used by past global sporting events, such as the 2022 Qatar World Cup. “Here we are trying to find another way,” he says. To him, letting the algorithms crawl CCTV footage is a way to ensure the event is safe without jeopardizing personal freedoms. “We are not analyzing any personal data. We are just looking at shapes, no face, no license plate recognition, no behavioral analytics.”
Levain is concerned the AI surveillance systems will remain in France long after the athletes leave. To her, these algorithms enable the police and security services to impose surveillance on wider stretches of the city. “This technology will reproduce the stereotypes of the police,” she says. “We know that they discriminate. We know that they always go in the same area. They always go and harass the same people. And this technology, as with every surveillance technology, will help them do that.”
Please stop referring to things that are clearly not exhibiting intelligence as “AI”.
I can’t argue with you on that.
The term “artificial intelligence” has been in use since the 1950s and it encompasses a wide range of fields. Image recognition and pattern matching like this are very much a part of the field of artificial intelligence.
The people who are insisting it’s being misused have learned the term largely from science fiction rather than from the actual scholarly field. In science fiction, sure, “AI” almost always refers solely to Mr. Data-style artificial people. But the technical term for that style of AI is Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, and it’s a small subset of the field of AI.