- Sainsbury's has suspended its live AI facial recognition technology at an East Dulwich store after a customer was wrongly flagged as a shoplifter.
- Matt Arnold was forced to leave the store after staff acted on an automated alert, describing the experience as a terrifying glimpse of the future.
- Both Sainsbury's and technology provider Facewatch insisted that the incident was caused by human error in handling the alert rather than a failure of the AI system.
- Mr Arnold highlighted that despite Facewatch's claimed 99.98 per cent accuracy rate, the small error margin still affects a significant number of shoppers.
- The suspension follows a similar incident in January where another customer was mistakenly asked to leave a London branch after being confused with an offender.
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