On the one hand, a lot of the talk abt the power and menace of AI-driven facial recognition software is overblown because, to be perfectly frank, none of the software is very good. A lot of the people reporting on it are just repeating the ad copy published by the companies selling the software.
On the other hand, it isn't overblown at all because so-called forensic science has always been pretty shit but that hasn't stopped prosecutors from being able to convince jurors that cops have magic powers
I used AI face recognition in 2007 and it was decent at telling who was in a photo once I gave it some training data. Now, I'm sure it's a harder problem to pick out one of millions of people than one of dozens, and the standard for a court of law should be higher than for a photo album. But AI has been better than many humans at face recognition for a while.












