Credit: Michael Myers

A school in Florida was forced into shutdown after an AI-based weapon detection system mistakenly triggered an entire campus lockdown by mistaking a clarinet for a firearm.

Occurring on December 16th, kids attending Lawton Chiles Middle School in Oviedo found their festive cheer ruined after a code red lockdown was enforced by administrators in response to the AI system.

Police responded to the scene to find that the biggest danger wasn’t a threat to life, but instead the unassuming musical instrument.

The school’s principal, Melissa Laudani, explained in a message to parents that the safety protocols were not in response to any actual threat. She wrote, “While there was no threat to campus, I’d like to ask you to speak with your student about the dangers of pretending to have a weapon on a school campus.”

The school is an avid user of an AI-driven threat detection platform that, mainly, scans live video feeds for firearms. As the school falls under the jurisdiction of Seminole County Public Schools, they benefit from a contract with the Pennsylvania-based ZeroEyes for its cloud-based “gun detection deterrent” system.

The district pays $250,000 for the subscription service, which integrates with existing surveillance cameras and employs an algorithm trained on pictures of over 100 firearm types.

When the programme believes a weapon has been detected, footage is sent to human analysts at the monitoring centre. The humans confirm the alert before notifying law enforcement or schools; however, the human level of protection failed to identify that the firearm was, in fact, a clarinet.

The company has since received many a disgruntled letter from the parents of the school, but has failed to respond to emails requesting to see specific figures on how many confirmed threats the expensive platform has prevented.

It remains clear that AI-based technology is not totally reliable for monitoring real-time circumstances, especially, it appears, when musical instruments are involved.