IMO this is really more a of a proof of concept or statement on where things COULD go if currently technology trends progress for another decade or so.
Magic tricks often operate in the same way, you have some meticulous preparation that can produce a specific result, one time, under specific conditions. If you obfuscate the preparation and people don't realize how specific the conditions are, then it looks like something more profound happened than really did.
> Then he enlisted an artificial intelligence (A.I.) bot, which scraped public Instagram photos taken in those locations, and facial-recognition software, which paired the Instagram images with the real-time surveillance footage.
Why would he need an "AI which scraped public Instagram photos"? You can just ask Instagram for photos tagged "Times Square" and get loads of them. Totally unnecessary to teach an AI what Times Square looks like when there are a bazillion tagged photos of Times Square being posted every hour. Maybe you need a lot of them, but "bulk scraping lots of Instagram posts" isn't exactly AI.
These days, there are people who are extremely good at locating much harder photos in time and space. This one is relatively simple:
https://craighays.com/how-an-investigator-can-find-your-loca...