According to the police, when the kid told Siri that he is going to shoot up a school, the AI-powered assistant returned with the names of multiple schools in the vicinity.
Highlights:
- Schoolboy detained for telling Siri, “I am going to shoot up a school”
- Police say the kid took a screenshot and posted it on social media thinking it’s a joke
When Google introduced Duplex, its AI-powered tech that used Assistant to answer calls, it attracted criticism for allegedly being murky. However, the critics didn’t know at that time that technology could potentially paint a gloomier picture in the future. In a bizarre and worrisome incident, a middle school US boy was detained and charged with intimidation after he threatened to shoot up a school on Apple’s AI Assistant Siri.
According to the police, they are investigating a general threat to school safety made today by the boy, who told Siri, “I am going to shoot up a school.” To his surprise, Siri returned with the names of multiple schools in the vicinity. The boy apparently found it interesting and posted it on his social media account for fun, however, his contacts took that ‘joke’ seriously. Here, the role of technology is more disturbing as it led to the arrest of the 13-year-old boy, who was just ‘joking’
The police say that the 'contacts' of the school kid informed the police after they saw the screenshot taken by the accused on the social media. “The male made no direct threat to a specific person, school, or school system. It has since been discovered the male has no access to weapons and posted the picture on social media as a joke. The threat is not believed to be credible at this time; however, these types of communications are taken very seriously by the Valparaiso Police Department and our community,” the police was quoted as saying.
The incident comes at a time when there is a strong demand for stringent gun laws in the US. The country has seen an upward spiral in mass shootings in recent years with some of them occurring within school compounds where numerous innocent children have become victims. According to Inquirer, there were 97 school gun violence incidents in 2018 alone. This is reportedly much higher than the previous record of 59 incidents in 2006. The report says that 11 gun violence incidents have already been recorded in the US in 2019.
According to a BBC report, 2018 was the ‘worst year for US school shootings’, as a total of 113 people were killed or injured in school shootings in the US. Many parts of the US have about 180 school days per year, which means that, on an average, there was a shooting incident once every eight school days.
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