As I understand, eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. Although, it's valuable for convincing juries, because people think it's reliable.

I was a witness to a crime that led to a short police chase and a police shooting, and I couldn't accurately describe which direction the car was facing when it passed me (reversing or forward).

Up until that point I'd have thought I would be a reliable witness (I didn't, but this proved it definitively!)

I actually have a very similar story. When I was younger, I was witness to a pretty bad car accident, and I gave them my information, and was later subpoenaed as a witness. Before going, I thought I had a pretty good recollection of the event -- it happened right in front of me. When I got there, I was also stumped by simple questions about which direction one of the cars was going.

It was really eye-opening for me. Thinking about it is still kind of eerie. I remember the accident. I can see it in my head. But apparently the memory is not exactly correct.

You were bamboozled by a clever attorney or made to look like an idiot by an incompetent one.

I served on a jury where an attractive, sharp defense attorney just ripped a witness to shreds. The person testifying was a customer engineer who installed and repaired a particular piece of equipment, whose entire function was dependent on time. He was testifying about what he did every day, not some nuance about direction of travel.

She built the poor guy up and then threw him off a cliff. At the end he ended up testifying that time is impossible to accurately measure. The issue was pretty obvious - the incompetent DAs didn’t prepare the witness for cross examination.

In my case, it was just one single simple question about pointing out the direction the car was coming from and going to on a diagram of the intersection.

There was nothing clever about the question. Maybe they had a few up their sleeve for subsequent questions, but we never got that far, as I was immediately dismissed. I spent maybe 60 seconds in the courtroom.

It really was a case of casual observer not having useful information. Just because I saw and heard the impact doesn’t mean that noticed any of the details that would have made a difference to anyone.

> You were bamboozled by a clever attorney or made to look like an idiot by an incompetent one

There's plenty of research about the unreliability of memory.

> I was also stumped by simple questions about which direction one of the cars was going.

Presumably lawyers are very good at finding exactly the right questions to ask to exploit the weaknesses of human memory and make a witness look unreliable.

> which in general is better at recognizing faces than humans

Big citation needed there...

> we should release every person who is in prison because an eyewitness ID'd them.

in spite of my previous statement this is not wrong if an eyewitness ID (from a stranger to the defendant) was the only thing that led to conviction

He's probably referring to the fact that AI is better than humans at telling if two photos are of the same person. But I agree that doesn't translate to being better at recognising faces in general.

People might still be better at recognising faces they have learnt, and they might be worse in terms of percentage correctness, but have less bad failure modes.

> which in general is better at recognizing faces than humans

Do you have anything other than an assertion for that?

It is obvious unless you are talking 5 faces that AI learned vs 5 faces that human really learned.

Otherwise AI is scalable and can recognize millions of faces.

So when it comes to even tiny recognition for safety or security - it doesn't matter how good are humans at recognizing a few faces they can remember.

Your comment exemplifies my point. You have a hidden bias, which is why you used the word "obvious".

The metric that is used is extremely important. If the metric is "identify lots of faces" then AI is superior. If "identity faces correctly" is the metric, then it is far from certain or obvious that an AI is superior to a human.

All recognising people should be illegal