AI Mistakes Ad On a Bus For an Actual CEO, Then Publicly Shames Them For 'Jaywalking'

An anonymous reader quotes the South China Morning Post:
Since last year, many Chinese cities have cracked down on jaywalking by investing in facial recognition systems and AI-powered surveillance cameras. Jaywalkers are identified and shamed by displaying their photographs on large public screens... Developments are also underway to engage the country's mobile network operators and social media platforms, such as Tencent Holdings' WeChat and Sina Weibo, to establish a system in which offenders will receive personal text messages as soon as they are caught violating traffic rules....
Making a compelling case for change is the recent experience of Dong Mingzhu, chairwoman of China's biggest maker of air conditioners Gree Electric Appliances, who found her face splashed on a huge screen erected along a street in the port city of Ningbo... That artificial intelligence-backed surveillance system, however, erred in capturing Dong's image on Wednesday from an advertisement on the side of a moving bus. The traffic police in Ningbo, a city in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, were quick to recognise the mistake, writing in a post on microblog Sina Weibo on Wednesday that it had deleted the snapshot. It also said the surveillance system would be completely upgraded to cut incidents of false recognition in future.

The article says the mistakenly-accused CEO's company later thanked the traffic police for their hard work, and 'called on people to obey traffic rules to keep the streets safe.'

'The Chinese government is currently working to combine the operations of more than 170 million public security cameras to strengthen its surveillance network's ability to track and monitor the country's 1.4 billion citizens. Research firm IHS Markit has estimated that the number of surveillance cameras in China could reach 450 million by 2020.'

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