Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. A police officer in Germany uses a pipette to transfer urine from a sample cup to a rapid drug test last month. A small percentage of alcohol tests used in California have shown accuracy problems. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

A federal prosecutor alleged that one defendant boasted that his father "had engaged in similar business for the Chinese Communist Party." US authorities allege four people based in Florida, Alabama, and California conspired to illegally ship supercomputers and hundreds of Nvidia GPUs to China as recently as July. The charges, which were unsealed in federal court on Wednesday, are part of a wider government effort to crack down on the smuggling of advanced AI chips to China. Over the past few years, the US has introduced a series of export control rules designed to prevent Chinese organizations from acquiring computer chips that have become popular for developing AI chatbots . The restrictions aim to slow China in what US officials have described as a race to develop powerful AI systems, including surveillance tools and autonomous weapons .

Accountable use of AI systems in high-stakes settings relies on making systems contestable. In this paper we study efforts to contest AI systems in practice by studying how public defenders scrutinize AI in court. We present findings from interviews with 17 people in the U.S. public defense community to understand their perceptions of and experiences scrutinizing computational forensic software (CFS) -- automated decision systems that the government uses to convict and incarcerate, such as facial recognition, gunshot detection, and probabilistic genotyping tools. We find that our participants faced challenges assessing and contesting CFS reliability due to difficulties (a) navigating how CFS is developed and used, (b) overcoming judges and jurors' non-critical perceptions of CFS, and (c) gathering CFS expertise. To conclude, we provide recommendations that center the technical, social, and institutional context to better position interventions such as performance evaluations to support contestability in practice.

A California family endured a terrifying ordeal when scammers using artificial intelligence fooled them into believing their son had been in a serious accident. Amy Trapp was working a normal day at Mill Valley school near San Francisco when she received a call from an unknown number and picked up the phone to the sound of a voice that she believed to be her son, according to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle. "It was my son's voice on the phone crying, telling me, 'Mom, mom, I've been in a car accident,'" Trapp told the outlet. The mother said she instantly felt a panic and had visions of her son, who was away at college near California's central coast, lying underneath a car or on the side of the road in a pool of his own blood. Instead, another voice came on the phone and told Trapp he was a police officer and that her son, Will, had injured a pregnant woman in the crash and was taken to jail.

For the last few years, Clearview AI's tool has been largely restricted to law enforcement, but the company now plans to offer access to public defenders. Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive, said this would help "balance the scales of justice," but critics of the company are skeptical given the legal and ethical concerns that swirl around Clearview AI's groundbreaking technology. The company scraped billions of faces from social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and other parts of the web in order to build an app that seeks to unearth every public photo of a person that exists online. "I think it's a rare situation in which most defense attorneys would want to use it," said Jerome Greco, who oversees a forensics technology lab at the Legal Aid Society, in New York City. "This is mostly being done as a P.R. stunt to try to push back against the negative publicity that Clearview has about its tool and how it's being used by law enforcement."

The centuries-old process of releasing defendants on bail, long the province of judicial discretion, is getting a major assist -- courtesy of artificial intelligence. In late August, Hercules Shepherd Jr. walked up to the stand in a Cleveland courtroom, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. Two nights earlier, an officer had arrested him at a traffic stop with a small bag of cocaine, and he was about to be arraigned. Judge Jimmy Jackson Jr. looked at Shepherd, then down at a computer-generated score on the front of the 18-year-old's case file. The scores marked Shepherd as a prime candidate for pretrial release with low bail.

The centuries-old process of releasing defendants on bail, long the province of judicial discretion, is getting a major assist ... courtesy of artificial intelligence. In late August, Hercules Shepherd Jr. walked up to the stand in a Cleveland courtroom, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. Two nights earlier, an officer had arrested him at a traffic stop with a small bag of cocaine, and he was about to be arraigned. Judge Jimmy Jackson Jr. looked at Shepherd, then down at a computer-generated score on the front of the 18-year-old's case file. The scores marked Shepherd as a prime candidate for pretrial release with low bail.

While document review used to be tedious work for lawyers, Kirk says they can now sift through gigabytes of data within days with the help of artificial intelligence. While document review used to be tedious work for lawyers, Kirk says they can now sift through gigabytes of data within days with the help of artificial intelligence. This is part of an occasional series: Is My Job Safe? These stories look at jobs that might be at risk because of technology and automation. Shannon Capone Kirk's first job as a young lawyer in the late '90s was "document review."

Maryland's Office of the Public Defender has asked the Baltimore Police Department to stop filming citizens from the sky until the public is briefed on the program and defense attorneys are given access to the footage. The public defender also wants to know how evidence gathered by the recently disclosed aerial surveillance program has been stored, accessed and used in the prosecution of criminal defendants. The office said the program should be shelved until there are "in-depth conversations" about how it works, and police should stop analyzing footage unless they have "prior judicial authorization in the form of a search warrant or equivalent court order." Baltimore Deputy Public Defender Natalie Finegar made those requests in letters delivered Monday to Police Commissioner Kevin Davis and Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby. "We are requesting that this surveillance program be suspended until such time as public hearings can be held and a clear avenue of discovery and access to data by defense attorneys is established," Finegar wrote to Davis.