I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the Tennessee grandmother who was arrested and taken into custody by the Fargo Police Department?

This woman spent time in lock up, has now been released and has sued the Fargo Police Department for a reported $10 million.

This all happened because artificial intelligence facial recognition said this Tennessee grandmother was the fugitive, even though when the human eye looks at these two women side by side, they don’t look at all the same.

I’d like to say a few things about AI why this is a problem.

In the past couple of years, I’ve done a lot of work on my family tree. And during that time, I’ve received a boat load of photographs from relatives. Many of them have been in poor condition. Some were cracked, some were blurry, some were faded, some were missing parts of the photograph, etc.

I’ve learned from genealogy experts that if and when you decide to do something with photos of that nature, such as a write a book, publish a memoir, build a family tree on paper, it’s better to have good quality photographs because it lends itself to better professionalism.

Because I was putting a family tree book together, I took the advice and purchased a computer program called Kaze AI. It digitally enhances photographs, can colorize them, can remove background information and can even “seal” up those cracks and remove imperfections.

Here’s where this gets dicey, and I just want to clarify I bought this program for its intended use. But if I had a devious mind, I could create something that would rival what the Fargo Police Department has dealt with. I’m not saying the Fargo PD altered anything, I’m just saying the possibility exists to manipulate photographs in such a way that a case of mistaken identity could be the result.

My brother produced a photograph that we both assumed was from the 1860s. After a lot of research and some advice from the North Dakota State Historical Society, it was determined it was our great great-grandfather, circa 1865. The photo was very fragile, cracked in numerous places had water stains on it and even though it was sepia, it looked horrible.

Through a series of steps, I ran the photo through Kaze AI numerous times and the result is what looks like a studio photograph. It’s really amazing in that respect, but there is a however with this program.

I had an uncle who was killed in World War II in the Aleutian Islands. My cousin sent me a photograph of him while he was in Alaska. It was black and white. Back to the genealogical advice, I decided I wanted it colorized. I ran the photo through the program and it came out with him wearing a Confederate uniform. I did it again, same result, I did it again, same result, so I gave up.

My grandfather, my dad, my brother and his son, my nephew were all in a four-generation photo that was printed in the Emmons County Record in 1970. It was newsprint so it was very dark and you could hardly see the faces. That photo is significant to our family so I decided to improve it and colorize it. My grandfather and the baby look exactly as they did in 1970, but my dad and brother don’t even look close to what they should look like.

Somebody gave me a picture of my grandparents on their wedding day in 1915. The photo was a good image, but it was poorly cropped. Part of my grandfather’s head and his shoes weren’t showing. I used the expansion tool on Kaze AI and it gave him a full head of hair and nice, shiny, black shoes.

In another situation, I received a photo of my grandfather’s sister who lived in Nebraska and never married. Again, this was a poor photo so I tried to improve it. The result, the color turned out nice, but she had a beard, obviously not the correct likeness.

There are numerous other examples just like this and after using this program for about a year, I understand how AI can easily be abused and used for the wrong purposes, such as a court case.

And in an unrelated situation, I had two DNA tests done on myself from two separate companies, and guess what, they don’t match. It confused me, but my biggest fear with that is how would lawyers approach that in a court of law? Could that result in a situation like the Fargo Police Department got themselves into?

In my opinion, AI needs to be heavily scrutinized and heavily regulated. It’s not a perfect science.