ABC News AU – Then an innocent man got locked up. “A new kind of powerful AI was driving a rollout of facial recognition in law enforcement. It wasn’t just the US. This was happening around the world, including in Australia. For police, the benefits were obvious. Facial recognition could analyse a blown-up still taken from a security tape, sift through a database of millions of driver licence photos, and identify the person who did the crime. But the technology wasn’t perfect. Apart from facilitating a system of mass surveillance that threatened people’s privacy, the new AI systems were racially biased. They were significantly more likely to falsely identify people of colour. Despite this documented problem, police relied increasingly heavily on AI systems for investigations.”