From "Law and Order" to "CSI," not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go cold.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/how-the-junk-science-of-hair-analysis-keeps-people-behind-bars/
Basically, hair doesn’t have enough unique characteristics to identify a person and your hair changes all the time depending on diet, age, sun exposure, etc. Lots of shit we use is unreliable: blood-spatter patterns, arson analysis, bite-mark comparisons, and now finger prints!
Have you read the link? It doesn’t say thay that analysing figerprints is less powerfull than was known, but more. It describes previously unknown connection between fingerprints of different fingers of a single person. This could indicate, for example, that two crimes were probably commited by the same person even when not a single identical fingerprint was found on both sites.
Seems like pretty flimsy evidence if all we have to go off of is an AI that only gets it right 80% of the time… I highly doubt you could show the 2 fingerprints to anyone else to verify visually, and we’re just supposed to trust it?
Well, it wouldn’t be good evidence on its own at court, but can very well nudge an investigation in a right direction. And anyway, it’s a first step, done with little resources and ablimited dataset for training. And at least for me, it’sbthe first time I hear something like this is possible at all. Others said that tools to the same effect were around for quite a while, but I haven’t seen anyone providing sources, especially some that would give quantification of its capabilites.