> Once they were in hand, Fargo police met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had already been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time police interviewed her.

How is this the fault of AI? It flagged a possible match. A live human detective confirmed it. And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.

There's a reason why we don't let AI autonomously jail people. Instead of scapegoating an AI bogeyman, maybe we should look instead at the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility, and a criminal justice system that thinks it is okay to jail people for 5 months before even starting to assess their guilt.

Every time I see something like this I can never quite believe this sort of stuff happens. Complete, life ruining incompetence, with no consequences for the idiots that caused this to happen. Ignoring the AI input, which to me has nothing to do with this (it was used as a tool to identify a potential suspect), this woman went to jail for 5 months on the opinion of someone with no other evidence. Only in America.

> Her bank records showed she was more than 1,200 miles away, at home in Tennessee at the same time police claimed she was in Fargo committing fraud.

> Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog

https://thecivilrightslawyer.com/2026/03/11/ai-software-tell...

In the video, it shows a police officer blindly trusting a casino's AI software, even when a cursory investigation should have given any reasonable person enough of a reason to question whether the man he arrested was the same man accused of a crime. (And then even after it was confirmed he was not, the prosecutor continued to charge him for trespassing!)

Also me, reading further: Uh-oh.

The chief of police also resigned today; wouldn't be shocked if this was part of the reasoning.

The cops cannot be held accountable because the laws basically give them immunity. The politicians cannot be held accountable beyond being tossed out at the next election, because the laws otherwise give them immunity. The people operating the system cannot be held accountable, because the systems are marketed as authoritative despite being black boxes and lacking in transparency; they trusted the system just as they were told to, and thus cannot be held accountable.

And so when every human in the chain cannot be held accountable for these things, and the law prevents victims from receiving apologies, let alone recourse, then the tool and its maker is the only thing we can hold accountable. By deflecting blame away from the tools ("it wasn't AI, it was facial recognition"; "the human had to sign off on it"; "humans made the arrest, not machines"), you're protecting quite literally the only possible entity that could still potentially be held accountable: the dipshits making these stupid things and marketing them as superior and authoritative when compared to humans.

You want accountability? Start holding capital to account, and this shit falls away real fucking fast. Don't get lost in technical nuance over very real human issues.

That doesn't mean we should accept it from AI. We should fight the blind yielding to the facade of authority regardless of whether the decision was made by an AI or an insect landing on a teleprinter at the wrong time.

I smell a lawsuit

https://nob.cs.ucdavis.edu/classes/ecs153-2019-04/readings/c...

End qualified immunity and see how fast cops start to do their jobs with care.

Winning a lawsuit literally ends in your own community members (not the cops) paying the bill.

/i

Absolutely ridiculous, I hope she wins her civil case.

Pretend the tool is 99.999999% specific. If it searches every face in the USA you're still getting about 3 false positives PER SEARCH.

You will never have a criminal AI tool safe enough to apply at a national scale.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/12/tennessee-gr... - Another article on this without a paywall.

It's annoying that both articles are calling this AI error. This was human error, the police did the wrong thing and the people of Fargo will end up paying for this fuckup.

Unfortunately we'll probably see a trend of people using AI and then blaming AI for cases where they mis-used AI in roles it's not good for or failed to review or monitor the AI.

Edit: this is in reference to the original headline "AI error jails innocent grandmother for months in North Dakota fraud case" not the revised title that it was changed to.

Though, the question remains: are the tools built in such a way as to deceive the user into a false sense of trust or certainty?

_Some_ of the blame lies on the UX here. It must.

This type of incident isn't new and is only going to get worse. The problem is our governments are doing absolutely nothing about it. I'll give two examples:

1. Hertz implemented a system where they falsely reported cars as being stolen. People were arrested and went to jail for rental cars that were sitting in the Hertz lot. Hertz ultimately had to pay $168 million in a settlement [1]. That's insufficient. If I, as an ordinary citizen, make a false police report that somebody stole my car I can be criminally charged. And rightly so. People should go to jail for this and it will continue until they do. These fines and settlements are just the cost of doing business; and

2. The UK government contracted Fujitsu to produce a new system for their post offices. That system was allowed to produce criminal charges for fraud that were completely false. People committed suicide over this. This went on for what? A decade or more? But resuted in a parliamentary inquiry and settlements. It's known as the British Post Office scandal [2]. Again, people should go to jail for this.

The choice we as a society face is whether to have automation improve all of our lives by raising everyone's standard of living and allowing us to do less work and less menial work or do we allow automation to further suppress wages so the Epstein class can be slightly more wealthy.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal