This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network. Rohtak and New Delhi, India: Dhuli Chand was 102 years old on September 8, 2022, when he led a wedding procession in Rohtak, a district town in the north Indian state of Haryana. As is customary in north Indian weddings, he sat on a chariot in his wedding finery, wearing garlands of Indian rupee notes, while a band played celebratory music and family members and villagers accompanied him. But instead of a bride, Chand was on his way to meet government officials. Chand resorted to the antic to prove to officials that he was not only alive but also lively.

On Thursday, a federal lawsuit was filed that alleges gunshot detection technology that uses artificial intelligence wrongfully imprisoned the plaintiff Michael Williams. The gunshot detection technology that has been thrown into question is developed by the company ShotSpotter, which deployed numerous microphones around the city, which are paired with an AI system that is capable of determining when a gunshot has been fired. Once that system detects the appropriate sound, it notifies local police. In Williams' case, Chicago police used audio recordings by ShotSpotter as critical evidence against Williams, who was charged with murder in 2020 for allegedly shooting a man inside his vehicle. Now, Williams, along with the human rights advocacy group The MacArthur Project, is looking to recover damages from the city of Chicago, as well as reparations for loss of income, legal bills, and the mental anguish caused by being imprisoned.

Robert Williams was doing yard work with his family one afternoon last August when his daughter Julia said they needed a family meeting immediately. Once everyone was inside the house, the 7-year-old girl closed all the blinds and curtains and then told her sister and parents that she'd figured it out: Wooly Willy, a character from her toy, had stolen the watches that got her dad arrested. "She was like'We need to get to the bottom of this,'" her mother Melissa says. More recently, Melissa says, Julia has said she believes people who wear shirts that say "Detroit" represent the people who arrested her father. Williams was arrested in January 2020 for allegedly stealing five watches from a Shinola store in Detroit, after he was wrongfully identified by facial recognition software.

The Detroit department is also among hundreds of police agencies that have used Clearview AI, a facial recognition tool that searches through a large database of photos taken from across the Internet, according to a BuzzFeed News report earlier this month based on data from a confidential source. Neither the Detroit police nor Clearview have confirmed the report, and it does not appear Clearview was used in Williams's case.

The innovation of GPT-3 and advancements in facial recognition technology, brain chips, chatbots, self-driving cars, drones, as well as robotics have marked 2020 as the year of artificial intelligence. However, similar to any other technologies, AI also came with its challenges. From biasness to inaccuracy, AI has proved its immaturity in many cases. As a matter of fact, prominent tech leaders, researchers as well as scientists, like Elon Musk, Yann LeCun, as well as Bill Gates have continuously warned the industry about the hype AI has created and the consequences it can bring if not appropriately handled by the tech giants. Such critical judgements came from the many instances where AI failed to demonstrate its value to the industry.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a formal complaint against Detroit police over what it says is the first known example of a wrongful arrest caused by faulty facial recognition technology. Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, an African American man, was arrested after a facial recognition system falsely matched his photo with security footage of a shoplifter. The New York Times reports that the ACLU is calling for the dismissal of Williams' case and for his information to be removed from Detroit's criminal databases, and prosecutors have since agreed to delete his data. Facial recognition technology has been criticized for years, with researchers showing it to be biased against members of different races and ethnicities. But its use by law enforcement has grown even more controversial in recent weeks following nationwide protests against police brutality and racism.

A group of Democratic Senators and House representatives have introduced a bill that seeks to ban federal use of facial recognition technology. It follows an incident in which Detroit police wrongfully arrested a man after a facial recognition system incorrectly flagged him as a suspect. That's believed to be the first wrongful arrest of its kind in the US. Senators Ed Markey (Massachusetts) and Jeff Merkley (Oregon) authored the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which Reps. The aim of the bill is to "prohibit biometric surveillance by the federal government without explicit statutory authorization."

A man uses the dating app Tinder in New Delhi in 2015. A man uses the dating app Tinder in New Delhi in 2015. The dating app Tinder has made a change that it hopes will make the experience more inclusive for transgender and gender non-conforming people. Previously, users had to identify either as a man or a woman. Now, the company says people can now select a gender description from a much wider array of options.

A university professor is heading the Japanese version of a U.S.-led movement to exonerate people who have been wrongfully charged and imprisoned using DNA testing. Mitsuyuki Inaba, 51, who is neither a lawyer nor an expert in criminal law, is a professor at Ritsumeikan University's College of Policy Science. He believes Japan's criminal justice system is rife with fundamental failures that lead to wrongful imprisonment due to the "unscientific" way in which investigations are carried out. Inaba, who specializes in cognitive science, took up the post of director at the Innocence Project Japan, which was launched in April in cooperation with lawyers and other legal experts. Similar movements have sprouted in Britain, South Africa and Taiwan.