The injured teenage survivor of a January 2025 shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee high school recently sued the manufacturer of an “AI gun detection” system that failed to detect the handgun that left two dead, including the shooter.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Davidson County court last month, the security company Omnilert either knew or should have known that there were “significant operational limitations in its gun detection system that could result in detection failures during actual emergencies, including limitations based on camera placement, proximity of the weapon to camera sensors, camera angle, lighting, and weapon visibility.”
Omnilert cofounder Ara Bagdasarian declined Ars’ invitation to answer questions about the lawsuit. System Integrations, the other defendant in the case, which resold the Omnilert system, also did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.
It would flag it as a gun. How do I know? I worked on and developed a similar system at one point. It worked extremely well. We weren’t an American company and ultimately covid killed us (it was US American orgs that were the most interested in our stuff).
Do you think LLMs are being used for this sort of thing? Putting aside the sheer technical mountain of a hurdle that slapping an LLM vision model on top of dozens and dozens of real-time camera streams, the hardware requirements would put the company out of business before they made their first sale.
Computer vision models, which are NOT LLMs, have been around for quite a while now and are very good at doing one thing and one thing only. And they’ll do it well for a miniscule fraction of what it takes to run an LLM.
No, datacentres are not being used for real-time gun detection. The company might have other kinds of infrastructure located in a DC, but not the main video processing hardware.
Yes. It took all of five seconds to find out too.
You’ve already been wrong once, care to try for two?
Using a LLM for detecting a specific object on an image is possible but stupid: if your object is always the same (like in this case) it’s several orders of magnitude cheaper to train once on that specific object then use the computer vision model running directly on the local server that’s recording the video.
Otherwise:
Use cases for LLM-based image recognition is if the object changes at every request or it’s ultra specific with brands and colors
It isn’t the same though. A large gauge shotgun and a small gauge pistol are pretty different looking. Compare those to a .22 rifle with a scope, and those to a decked out ar15. That’s a lot of different always the sames. What if it’s a revolver? Or has a folded stock? Or a sawed off stock? Will it recognize a derringer or a mac10 with a large capacity mag as guns?
We can because they make us dead. We have valid reason to fear them which is a great motivator for most species to learn to recognize the danger. You’d still recognize a ring gun as a gun, without getting specifically trained to do so a machine will identify it as jewelry.
so, train the computer vision model for a gun and train again for a shotgun. Run the two detection models at the same time.
Your approach is the typical “but if you really want you can use an atomic bomb to kill mosquitoes” - yes, you could do that, but nobody is paying $1 mil/year in inference costs (+some expensively licensed software to wrap around that) when it can be done locally with a $300 GPU (+ some expensively licensed software to wrap around that)