A school locked down after AI flagged a gun. It was a clarinet
71 comments
·December 18, 2025Vinnl
I feel like as soon as a particular type of student learns that this is used, they'll have an excellent way to get that test that they didn't study for postponed, and even have plausible deniability that they didn't intend to lock the school down. At least for the first one or two times, after that it's back to triggering the fire alarm.
estimator7292
At my high school it was bomb threats. At least two or three a year
bluGill
That happened at my mom's school (back in the 1960s) until the school put all the kids on a bus and brought them to the local armory gym and made all student sit quietly (no talking) on the floor until the end of the school day. Once the bomb threat wasn't a way to get out of school on a nice day there was never another one.
I'm not sure how to apply that to this situation, but it is one every school should think about when students try things.
Zigurd
That depends on who you think needs to learn a lesson about buying an AI from Temu.
aleph_minus_one
> Once the bomb threat wasn't a way to get out of school on a nice day there was never another one.
If I think of my school time, I would believe even the fact that a bomb threat would be an annoyance to teachers would a be sufficient reason (of course, in the schools of the country where I live there were other methods than bomb threats to be an annoyance to teachers).
rwmj
It's not exactly the same situation, but this happened before AI. At least the clarinet owner didn't get shot & killed like this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Harry_Stanley
On 22 September 1999, Stanley was returning home from the Alexandra Pub in South Hackney carrying, in a plastic bag, a table leg that had been repaired by his brother earlier that day. Someone had phoned the police to report "an Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag".[2]
ramon156
> the prosecution evidence is insufficient to rebut the officers' assertion that they were acting in self defence
Awesome, they got away with unlawfully killing a man.
m4ck_
On a long enough timeline, without any changes, this garbage is going to get a kid murdered by overzealous LEOs (or teachers in places where they want the carrying.)
lingrush4
What's your point?
If the technology is even somewhat capable of detecting actual guns, it will probably save far more lives in the long run.
Zigurd
Cops killed a lot of people with negligible effect on crime. You're making an assertion that needs some support in light of the track record of US policing.
1over137
What is LEOs?
fredoralive
Law Enforcement Officers, ie the Police.
Stephen304
Law enforcement officer, or police.
null
sebastien_b
[dead]
gosub100
Or the next shooter will disguise their gun to look like a musical instrument.
Edit: I can't find it now but there is a body cam video of a Colorado school shooting where this almost happened. It wasn't due to an AI mixup but the school police was armed and I believe fired at one of the bad guys, but as the local PD responded he almost got shot because of the confusion: "school shooting, respond, guy with a gun"
bluGill
That has been a common trope in gangster movies for ages. A violin case can easially hide a gun (depending on the gun of course, but you get to select this). You can find craftsmen in your gang who can make a violin case that also has a gun so it can even be opened an inspected by someone who doesn't know how to find the secret gun compartment, and it isn't hard to teach someone to play some simple songs on a violin thus giving a reason to carry a violin (you don't need to be good, just be able to show you have another lesson next week). I don't know if this works as well in the real world as movies, but it is plausible.
jonhohle
Also the plot of El Mariachi https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0104815/ and its sequel, Desperado.
avs733
“School resource officers” shoot kids (and themselves) with terrifying frequency, the kids typically unarmed and often autistic/neurodivergent.
(The worlds laziest lit review) https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=school+resource+office+shoots...
interloxia
[dead]
TheCraiggers
Well at least it wasn't a bag of chips this time. A clarinet is at least a step towards the correct shape. Sounds like the AI training is going well!
Zobat
They tried to find contraband, they found a marching band!
bryanrasmussen
Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun
With a hundred and ten cornets right behind
The AI thought about it long and hard
calling up the national guard
Cause of the horns of ev'ry shape and kind.
---
There were copper bottom tympani in horse platoons
Thundering, thundering all along the way.
Double bell euphoniums and big bassoons,
And Swarming SWAT Teams Goons so they say
---
There were cross fires and blown tires
And reporters from the local news
Clarinets of ev'ry size
And trumpeters who'd improvise
And video games that went pew-pew!
----
on multiple edits: tried to find a layout that fit the song
sunrunner
Next time the contraband could be a contrabassoon.
kotaKat
Those banned band books… they might have come across One Thousand and One Vulgar Marching Band Formations!
WhyOhWhyQ
Is the gun situation hopeless in America? As far as I can tell, we just need to reduce the quantity of guns. Somehow 20% of the country takes that idea as an existential threat, even though not doing so is a material threat to real people.
If it's actually a mental health crisis, then how do we solve that one? Especially with what the Republicans are doing right now?
blibble
the guns don't even seem to work for their supposed primary purpose
uninvited and unwanted federal troops are roaming around cities against the wishes of state governors
rascul
> “We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”
Of course the co-founder of the company that made the error would say that.
rmunn
This hardly needs to be said here, but there should have been human review of the AI output before taking any drastic action. That would (I assume, though since I can't read the original article I don't know if that assumption is correct) have immediately let them know that the alleged "gun" was nothing of the sort, and avoided the massive disruption of a totally unnecessary lockdown.
nucleardog
Not sure how much that would help overall.
Unless it's completely clear that it's not a gun, the reviewer is essentially always going to pull the alarm. The risk of a false alarm is going to be seen as minimal, while the risk of a false negative is catastrophic.
False alarm makes the news for now because it's novel, we all go "What the hell, guys?" and life goes on.
Nobody wants to end up sitting in front of a prosecutor, the media, etc explaining why they chose not to pull the alarm, when the AI _clearly_ identified the gun, and instead chose to let all those kids die.
jermaustin1
One more instance of offloading blame to a computer system: "It's not my fault the cops shot the kid, the system said it was a gun."
The only way this gets fixed is if there are consequences at every level for false positives.
brk
That sounds good on paper, but is really impossible to implement in any practical way.
In this case, the kid was holding the clarinet like a weapon, and though we have not seen the actual video, the descriptions of it make it sound like overall resolution was poor.
The alternative to the false positive here, is to not report anything that you cannot be 110% certain of, which means that you're likely to miss some true positives.
Overall this situation mostly reads like everything worked as intended, and the press turned it into more than it needed to be. School shooting are a real thing, there is plenty of evidence of that. Weapons detection has become a necessary component of a school safety strategy. For many reasons, it is not practical to have personnel at the school, or within the district, act as the first-pass reviewer of AI detections of weapons.
dpoloncsak
>The only way this gets fixed is if there are consequences at every level for false positives.
Do we really want consequences for false positives? If a kid is smoking a cigarette in the bathroom and the smoke detector goes off, the school should evacuate. The Smoke Alarm went off. No principal is going to sign off on the assumption that "Timmy is smoking, it's not a real fire". The principal shouldn't be punished for responding to the alarm. Timmy...probably should get reprimanded, but that feels off-metaphor.
In the example we are given, Timmy did nothing wrong. Having a clarinet is not contraband, and he should not be punished. The admin who called a lockdown did nothing wrong, as they were responding to the system in the way they were trained to use it. This is all in the name of safety, where things are done in 'an abundance of caution'.
>"It's not my fault the cops shot the kid, the system said it was a gun."
No, its the cop's fault. The cop hasn't been trained to use the AI security system, and is instead given their own SOP for assessing threats.
WillAdams
One approach for this is that the person who makes the call needs to be on-site and in the front of the situation --- similarly, a judge signing off on a No-Knock Warrant --- the judge needs to be at least be present, and should be required to walk through the building/home/apartment after the warrant is served. If it's not important/severe enough for a judge to do this, then I would argue that there's no need for the "no knock" aspect.
j-conn
There was. From the article: '''
ZeroEyes said that trained employees review alerts before they are sent and that its software can make a lifesaving difference in averting mass shootings by alerting law enforcement to weapons on campus within seconds. At Lawton Chiles, the student flagged by ZeroEyes was holding his musical instrument like a rifle, co-founder Sam Alaimo told The Washington Post. “We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”
'''
brk
This appears to be a ZeroEyes customer, which means there was a human in the loop. One of ZeroEyes' main selling points is their use of 24/7 staffed SOCs to review anything the AI software flags before sending an actual alert to the site/customer.
htek
This is just conjecture, but I suspect there will be as much review of photos, application of good investigative work and overall professionalism as is conducted during anonymous, virtually untraceable Swatting incidents that terrify the victims, if not get them killed.
CoastalCoder
Good grief, imagine if it had been an oboe.
ablation
A weapon of mass diminuendo.
adzm
Or a bassoon!!
IAmBroom
Lots of jokes made, but in reality this mistake could have been made by a real human watching a video feed. The student was intentionally mimicking a weapon with a long, tubular object. It's not like he was just walking down the hall with it in his hands, and suddenly SWAT TEAM!
AI is often awful, but I'm giving it a pass on this one.
bluGill
I can't give a pass - kids do things like this often enough that you can't call the police on every incident. Sure it might be stupid for kids to do, but they do it, and since it isn't a real gun it is harmless fun until someone overreacts. The real issue here is fatigue: the more you overreact the less your seriously you are taken when something really does happen.
Once you can make a mistake and be okay, but you soon you become "the little boy who cried wolf", and people don't move to safety when there is a real issue!
https://archive.is/WbOWl