An AI apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed.
Taki Allen was sitting with friends on Monday night outside Kenwood high school in Baltimore and eating a snack when police officers with guns approached him.
“At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?’” Allen told the WBAL-TV 11 News television station.
Allen said they made him get on his knees, handcuffed and searched him – finding nothing. They then showed him a copy of the picture that had triggered the alert.
This news article is missing the statement from the school’s principle:
In a statement shared with parents, Principal Katie Smith said the school’s security department had reviewed and canceled a gun detection alert, while Smith (who didn’t immediately realize the alert had been canceled) reported the situation to the school resource officer, who called the local police. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/25/high-schools-ai-security-system-confuses-doritos-bag-for-a-possible-firearm/
Looks like this system just flags footage for review and humans make the ultimate decision.
I’m not sure how the notification on this flag/event is worded. It’s possible that it should be worded differently to express a need to actually look at the footage.
In this case the principle probably jumped into panic mode, or didn’t understand the system well enough.
How many times do we need stupid shit like this to happen before enough of us understand that while AI is artificial, it is NOT intelligent?
We made AI that behaves like middle management and assumed that meant that AI was intelligent. It turns out that middle management isn’t.
Nothing will happen unless it happens to someone in power. A random black kid being harassed is exactly the type of person that guys like Steve Miller want harassed.
So no one validated the report before responding.
That sounds like work. Besides it’s fun to just rough-up some teenager instead of doing boring paperwork!
