I Hope You’re Ready to Spend Months in Jail After AI Facial Recognition Tools Frame You for a Crime Both the U.S. and U.K. have already seen people arrested and held after mistaken AI facial recognition results. Photo via Unsplash, Maksim Chernishev Splinter AIToday in techno-dystopia news: You may have recently come across the story of a Tennessee woman named Angela Lipps, who spent more than five months in jail, first in Tennessee and then North Dakota, seemingly based on nothing more than the fact that she was mistakenly identified as a person of interest in a fraud investigation, in a state she says she’s never been to, by AI facial recognition tools used by police. It’s an infuriating story, although like so many tales in this mode, the more one looks into it, the more confusing and frustrating the lack of pertinent details becomes. What is not in dispute, though, is the fact that AI facial recognition tools are what ultimately pinned responsibility on Lipps, an incident that she says has effectively ruined her life as she weighs the possibility of a massive civil suit. And she’s not the first to suffer such an indignity–she’s just on the vanguard of a new victim class, such as the man in the U.K. who was arrested on suspicion of burglary due to facial recognition tools, despite the fact that he was 100 miles away from where the burglary actually occurred. For now, though, let’s focus on the case of Angela Lipps, which the woman’s lawyers have described as “the longest AI-related wrongful detention case in U.S. history” to date. It involves Lipps spending more than five months behind bars after her July, 2025 arrest, until her charges were dropped in December on Christmas Eve, thanks primarily to what certainly looks like