Artificial intelligence designed to shame jaywalkers in Ningbo, China, has backfired in recent days by misidentifying a woman in an advertisement on the side of a city bus as a jaywalking culprit.
Dong Mingzhu, who was in the ad and is head of China’s largest air conditioning manufacturer Gree Electric, had her face on display in the city as punishment for jaywalking.
The billboard display momentarily flashed the image of Mingzhu along with her name before law enforcement officials made the discovery and deleted the image, acknowledging it as a mistake in the AI system reacting to the advertisement, which they intend to fix.
Ningbo is not the only city in China to adopt a shaming billboard to punish jaywalkers. In Daye, jaywalkers are given the billboard treatment and are literally hosed down with water once facial recognition and lasers detect jaywalking.
As technology grows, so do the opportunities for preventing crimes, both violent ones and those that are simple nuisances. This trend is apparent in tech-savvy China — the country is always in on the latest in AI, incorporating it everywhere from helping out in the classroom to breeding cockroaches at farms for medicinal purposes.
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