Cops Want to Use DNA for Facial Recognition
by Michael Dean Thompson
Provide a DNA sample, and Parabon NanoLabs’ tech will generate a projected 3D image of a suspect’s face. The process takes advantage of AI trained on the DNA and 3D facial scans of thousands of volunteers. That might sound impressive, at least until compared with the Large Language Models of OpenAI, Google, and Meta, which have struggled to find enough training data despite their access to orders of magnitude more data that include the internet. In addition, scientists tell us that generating faces from DNA is just not possible, regardless of the size of the training set.
Given a suspect’s face generated by one highly questionable, unproven technology, it was not long before cops came up with the brilliant idea of running it through yet another questionable tech—artificial facial recognition. Facial Recognition Technology (“FRT”) has far fewer variables than DNA and is trained on millions if not billions of faces. Yet, FRT is still well-known for its spectacular failures that resulted in the arrests of innocent people like the visibly pregnant Michigan mother who was falsely accused and arrested for carjacking.
One major criticism of FRT is its failures with BIPOC communities, women, and non-binary persons. In part, the problem is thought to be because it lacks the breadth of training for those demographics in contrast to the training it receives with white men. Regardless, the FRT training data far exceeds the thousands of volunteers of Parabon NanoLabs and almost certainly spans a larger cross-section of society.
When a Georgia man who had never set foot in Louisiana was matched by FRT for a Jefferson Parish theft, it was despite an obvious weight difference and the presence of a facial mole. Neither of those features could have been accurately predicted by Parabon NanoLabs’ tech.
The result of mixing the two questionable technologies poses a risk to everyone. All too often, cops have been shown to zero in on the first seemingly viable candidate while ignoring other investigative leads.
Source: EFF.org
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