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.
My cousin wasn’t using any ML model. Their software probably did a geometric projection and that’s it. Then they’d search for the proposed owner of the fingerprint and get the real ones to compare against. That’s something that ML models cannot take from police as long as long as hallucinating is possible.
Right, so this methodology is a completely different approach. I don’t think it’s fair to call snake oil on this specifically with the justification that other models (using an entirely different approach) were.
Again, not saying it’s real or not, I’m just saying that it’s appropriate to try new approaches to examine things we already THINK we know, and to be prepared to carefully and fairly evaluate new data that calls into question things we thought we knew. That’s just science.