By Scott Calvert
Kristi Buckley was at work when a security camera aimed out her living room window pinged her phone: The neighbor's house is on fire. Cursing quietly, she hurried out to a hallway.
"If I was gonna yell, I was gonna yell, and I didn't want to do it in the office," said Buckley, a federal contractor in Houston.
Then she played the video. The "flames" were actually the red brake lights of her neighbor's car illuminating the darkness.
Home-security camera companies are embracing artificial intelligence to give customers detailed descriptions of their surveillance, instead of generic motion alerts. The notifications are often spot on. They can also be wildly wrong.
People on the receiving end of misfires are freaking out, when they aren't cracking up.
Cameras have tagged humans as bears and turkeys. Users say the devices have also registered a "bear" when it was a raccoon, a dog, even a fluttering flag. At least one corgi was called a pig. Window reflections have been misconstrued as a possible intruder and a tornado.
"They're astonishingly good at recognizing visual patterns, but they really don't have any common sense," said David Doermann, a computer-science and engineering professor at the University at Buffalo. "That's why it can be very impressive at one moment but completely wrong the next."
Buckley, 38, loves her Wyze camera and its ability to tell that a bird is a blue jay, or that the person by a truck is "a man in a white shirt walking alongside a Ford-350." But the phantom inferno keeps breaking out, she said, and recently a long, funnel-shaped reflection in her window prompted another false warning: "Tornado sighted."
Then there was the time her pit bull terrier, Thor, barked at a cat outside, jolting the feline skyward. Buckley got an alert about a "ninja cat." The video was a big letdown: "It was just a normal, non-ninja, black cat."
Wyze Labs co-founder and chief marketing officer Dave Crosby said AI descriptions on the company's devices are usually accurate and improving with user responses. "But there are just so many billions of unique scenarios that the models need to learn before they can get absolutely everything right," Crosby said.
Wyze, which says it has more than 13 million users, rolled out descriptive AI alerts in early 2025 and offers them on multiple cameras as part of a $19.99 monthly package.
Nationwide, 75 million homes have security cameras, according to SafeHome.org, a company that reviews products. It said a recent online survey found 28% of users have AI person and package detection, and 39% want facial recognition, despite concerns about surveillance and access to footage.
Tauf Chowdhury joined the AI alert trend, briefly. The digital-transformation consultant already had Ring cameras at his Long Island, N.Y., home when the Amazon.com-owned company gave him a free AI trial in March.
One day he received word that "a dark-colored bear is walking on the paved area." Chowdhury doubted it was a bear but was still worried. "I was like, oh, I hope it's not a person, because a person could be the same proportion as a bear," he said. "What the hell did it pick up?"
What it picked up was a rotund raccoon waddling by. Chowdhury, 44, said he opted against paying extra for AI after the trial ended.
As with all AI-driven features, the descriptions may occasionally be imprecise, a Ring spokesman said. The company refines its AI model using input from customers, who say they like knowing that a package arrived while they were in a meeting or that a family member got home safely. There are more than 100 million active Ring and Blink devices worldwide, he said, but didn't disclose how many customers use AI.
Vanessa Soderstrom was at home in Naples, Fla., with her teenage niece when her phone alerted her to someone at the sliding glass door. Her first thought: Somebody is trying to break in. The reality: Her niece's reflection in the glass confused her Blink camera.
"That really creeped me out," said Soderstrom, 49.
Later, when the AI reported a brown bear moving in the yard, she was less concerned. "I didn't really go too wild."
Good thing: "I was the brown bear," she said. The camera had recorded her sweeping up the lanai while wearing brown athleisure.
When the AI reported "a person is jumping from the roof of a house," it was Soderstrom again, this time standing up quickly in the lanai and grabbing a hose or broom, she recalled. In the system's defense, she said, the lanai's screen may have warped the computer's vision.
Blink customer William Dickey decided to test the system's AI prowess at his home in Cushing, Maine, by donning horror-movie masks from his collection, said his wife, April Dickey.
When he gazed at the camera as Pennywise the clown, the resulting alert conveyed no concern about the menacing visage.
"A person is standing on the porch and looking around," it reported blandly but accurately.
Write to Scott Calvert at scott.calvert@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 05, 2026 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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