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Comment by IAmBroom | Hacker News Reader

Lots of jokes made, but in reality this mistake could have been made by a real human watching a video feed. The student was intentionally mimicking a weapon with a long, tubular object. It's not like he was just walking down the hall with it in his hands, and suddenly SWAT TEAM!

AI is often awful, but I'm giving it a pass on this one.

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I can't give a pass - kids do things like this often enough that you can't call the police on every incident. Sure it might be stupid for kids to do, but they do it, and since it isn't a real gun it is harmless fun until someone overreacts. The real issue here is fatigue: the more you overreact the less your seriously you are taken when something really does happen.

Once you can make a mistake and be okay, but you soon you become "the little boy who cried wolf", and people don't move to safety when there is a real issue!

Do they have a way to uncall the alarm? Presumably between the time the kid mimicked a weapon and the police arrive, the kid stopped mimicking a weapon and it became clear that it was a clarinet?

> The student was intentionally mimicking a weapon with a long, tubular object.

That's... pretty much every student with any long, tubular object. Of which there are many.

The article notes the kid was (1) wearing a military costume and (2) then using his clarinet to simulate a weapon.

I don't know about the AI's decisions, but he would have caught the eye of a casual human observer. My point is: it was a bit more involved than just a 5yo pointing his finger and shouting "POW! I got you!".

A bit more. But not much.

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