No, not really. There was a real wolf and the person dusturbed the operation.
"South Korean police have arrested a man for sharing an AI-generated image that misled authorities who were searching for a wolf that had broken out of a zoo in Daejeon city.
The 40-year-old unnamed man is accused of disrupting the search by creating and distributing a fake photo purporting to show Neukgu, the wolf, trotting down a road intersection"
But there are real wolves when shepherding too. That’s why crying wolf has any power.
To cry wolf is to say there’s a wolf here when it’s actually located elsewhere. The AI photo said there was a wolf at a certain intersection when it was actually located elsewhere.
In fact crying wolf is doubly appropriate because it means disturbing an operation looking for a wolf.
If you stipulate that everyone must be relaxing at the time, sure. But the core concept of crying wolf is IMO simply a false alert with no particular constraints placed on those responding. I think in this case it simultaneously qualifies as crying wolf as well as misdirection.
Think of it like this: if this same story was happening a couple of centuries ago, pre-Internet, this person who just got arrested would have been sitting at their balcony, crying "the wolf is here! down at the intersection!" ; causing the hunting team to waste time.
The biggest difference now is wolf is actually sought to protect him¹ from the crowd of the super-predators in town, so they can "give him a calm environment for recovery".
¹ Following pronoun variant used in the fine article here.
I find that building a personal blocklist extension for myself lets me treat such threads as fertile grounds. I no longer get annoyed because I am pleased that I can quickly remove a lot of low quality commenters at once. Recommend writing one for yourself (trivial with LLM).
Original comment was clever and subsequent commenters were uninteresting to me. In this case, I only saw it because I’m on my phone which doesn’t have Chrome extensions. Turns out I’d already blocked them.
Well, I was a bit missled by the original comment, then I read the article, found the case to be a bit different than the tale and posted context. But giving the pedantry nature of HN, I should have probably been more clear in my wording to avoid the debate about meaning of words. Because yes, there is a resemblance to the fable, just not literally the same.
Serious suggestion: we flag responses or have a separate flag for comments which are unnecessarily pedantic / the commenter is functionally illiterate / the commenter didn't read (the three things are somewhat indistinguishable).
The fable was always relevant, afaic it is still a part of the curriculums. It's also a nice illustration of how LLMs screw up everything they touch - and please don't serve me the old "guns don't kill people - people kill people" argument over this.
Guns primary purpose is to kill. The primary purpose of genAI (image generation goes beyond the scope of LLMs) is not to mislead, they are used successfully by millions of people for purposes that are in no way nefarious. It includes valuable contributions to fields like medicine.
Like most important advances like plastics, nuclear power, diesel engines, synthetic fertilizers, computers and the internet, good and bad things came out of it.
It is like saying that plastics screw up everything they touch, for example when a plastic part is used to replace a more durable metal part, but before realizing that plastics are everywhere in our lives, often without a suitable replacement material.
:) Wow you are getting ahead of yourself aren't you. LLMs are dangerous tools that any moron nowadays has access to. They can fabricate images of wolves roaming the streets, hallucinate fake arguments that sound really convincing and even coach people into committing a suicide, as you probably heard in the recent at least a dozen cases. I can't quite see the comparison you are making. It's not like you have access to a nuclear reactor or whatever other dangerous technology you wanted to lump in with it, at your finger tips, do you? This is because those other dangerous technologies are carefully managed. So now follow where I am taking this, I'll be explain it really simple. Guns are really easily accessible to people in large parts of the US. So some people will use guns to kill other people. Sometimes its an accident, like kids playing with daddy's gun and shooting their sibling. Some people argue that guns should be restricted, as it would reduce such accidents and incidents. But some other people say "guns dont kill people - people kill people". Now LLMs are as a dangerous technology, accessible to most anyone not just in the US, but around the world. Also easier to use. So anyone with basic command of language and ability to clank on a keyboard can "use" it. To the point that some people not only harm others, like this Korean champ, but also themselves, like those people who were goaded into committing suicide. Now my point was, and it should not have been that hard to see, that your argument is precisely of the "guns don't kill people" variety. The point is, if the chatbots that we pompously resigned to call "artificial intelligence" make mistakes 30-40% of the time, and we use them to verify information, they are dangerous and should not be allowed to use for such purposes as misleading generating public. Because that is dangerous. Now, in your small little selfish world, maybe they are "everywhere", meaning, you can offload your thinking to them, and maybe you even use them to write emails and summarise other people emails so you don't completely drown in your boring office job. But it does not mean you should compare them to anything you listed above. Those small "benefits" do not account for overall shittines of this so-called technology.
It sounds like he didn’t actually file a false police report. They don’t even say they asked him whether it’s true. It seems the police just read a post by a random person on the internet, assumed it’s true, then arrested him when it wasn’t. The article is devastatingly light on info, though, so I can’t be sure.
Yeah, we can't actually tell whether the image was posted with the poster going 'hey, @SouthKoreanPolice, wolf is here!', or whether it was xit out without any comment or context, or whether it was in response to a friend who lives in the vicinity of the location in the picture wondering where the wolf was,...
I don't care enough to bother finding out, but seems like the BBC could have done some more journalism, if they were so inclined.
It's always amusing to see what crimes people demand to have strict liability for, yes. "He posted a wrong location online, of course that'd disrupt the search for the wolf, right to jail, right away".
Authorities also presented the AI image during a press briefing on the runaway wolf, local media reported. ... Authorities did not specify if the man had intentionally sent the photo to authorities during their search or simply shared it online.
With the info presented in the article, it sounds like the cops jumped to conclusions, got publicly embarrassed and are now going after him to either save face or get revenge (depending on how credulous you are of LEO).
Isn't the technology that enabled the deception noteworthy? Presumably this person wouldn't have been able to do this before AI.
Hypothetically, if a hacking tool was released that let non-technical people hack into sensitive databases, and then a journalist wrote the headline "local man hacks IRS", without any mention of the tool, wouldn't that be a bit irresponsible, to purposely leave that information out?
To make a shooped image good enough to fool the police into think they're looking at a completely real picture, you'd think it would take a reasonable amount of skill. If nothing else you need an exact match picture in terms of lighting and perspective.
I guess people here are too young to remember things like the WTC plane guy. Half the people online thought it was genuine, while he did it for the lulz in a few minutes. Nobody cared about inconsistent lighting and perspective. Same way most people don't care about the obvious hallmarks of diffusion model generated pictures today.
A person who had a Photoshop licence, had played around with layers and colour balance before and was sufficiently motivated to make it look convincing to spend a bit of time tidying it up, sure they could. But I'm not sure that necessarily applies to random people making funny memes of the wolf in their neighbourhood...
Creating a photorealistic mashup in Photoshop, without AI, takes a lot of skill. Just getting the shadows looking correct takes enough skill in itself, and that's only part of it.
Have you used Photoshop before? You come across as commenting on something you don't understand.
The technology used is very much relevant, because the ease of access and easiness of production are likely to have been the biggest contributors. Had they had to open an image editor and spend a few hours to make something convincing, they would’ve been much less likely to do so, assuming this particular person even had the skills, and would have had multiple opportunities to change their mind.
It’s a crime of opportunity¹, one where you have the idea and act on it on a whim. No opportunity, no crime, and the technology provided the opportunity.
It’s relevant in the sense that I would have never guessed this little prank would get someone arrested.
We need to learn/adapt what we post, see, believe in photos to avoid arrest. Especially so in the AI reality because generating these images, and these pranks, has become increasingly easy for anyone to do with no skills and minimal time.
I think the part I find most fascinating though is it’s not clear if he took this picture to the police, actively wasting their time, or if he just posted it and they found it and mistakenly took it as truth. I have no insight to SK laws but for me it’s going to be unfair if they were the ones that used this picture as evidence when if it was never meant to be taken seriously.
I'd say "Tesla" in your example would be the equivalent attention-grabber to "AI" in the article here, so your non-clickbait example might have been "car manufacturer fined for car accident"
Yes, and at the same time we should ask the question: would the intersection between "people who think this is a funny thing to do" and "people with the technical capabilities to actually generate something that misleads police" [1] return a value > 0 before GenAI?
[1] waiting for some example where fool policemen where outsmarted with simple tricks /s
"Easily in the pre-AI era" is different from "easier" & "easier" wasn't the claim.
To answer your question, relative ease is a function, in part, of one's skills & resources, so, it's certainly a reasonable claim to make, but will be different person to person.
Background image of some local street. Image of a wolf and object selection tool (pre AI era version). Touch up a little and add some filters to drop the quality.
Sure a little bit more involved than the two second AI prompt, but 3 min job for the lulz photoshoppers.
No, it’s not “a little bit more involved”, it’s significantly more involved because it also requires the skills to even know what you’re talking about, the experience of having done it before to be convincing, the inclination to spend the time on it, downloading Photoshop itself, possibly cracking it… There are a lot of steps, most of which most people haven’t done and don’t know how. With generative AI, you just open a website and type a few words.
There are significantly more people able to type a few words into a prompt than people who can use an image editor fast and convincingly and would be inclined to waste their time on this kind of fake.
> This is the kind of thing it was very easy to hire people for.
But would you? People grumble about $0.99 for an app they’ll use everyday, I doubt paying even $5 (and waiting for a result!) for a fake image to mislead police is high on anyone’s list.
Making this image was likely fast and free. It’s a crime of opportunity.
This argument has always seemed a bit silly to me. It's like responding to someone saying that it's easy to set up a hello world web server without AI with "but but but first you need to know what a web server is and how to use the command line and download a compiler/runtime and and and", as if there were some dire shortage of people who are already programmers. There are literally millions of us, the existence of one who would want to put up a website about pretty much anything you can think of is not some huge shock. We know this because we were literally there in that pre-AI world full of sites about all sorts of things! Just because you can now do the same thing with a prompt doesn't mean it was magically unlikely to find a site about, I don't know, the social lives of cane rats before.
And there are literally billions of everyone else.
Do you not see that the amount of fake images has exploded with free access and ease of use? That’s what a tool does. It’s silly to argue generative AI doesn‘t make a difference in the proliferation of fake images, just like it’d be arguing that digital photography on a small multi-purpose device that is always with you doesn’t make people take more pictures.
Why does it HAVE to be my relative when the actual question is whether hello world web servers exist?
I don't know why people are so determined to miss the point that "people can do [image manipulation] faster with AI" does not magically mean that people weren't doing it before AI, at scale mind you. Did y'all really unironically believe EVERY single image you saw on the internet prior to the past few years was entirely real and entirely what it was presented as? My goodness
Why is the Content Credentials Standard [1] not more supported? It's basically hardware-signing of images, which would make it fairly straightforward to identify AI-generated content.
The BBC article doesn't specify the text with the image, but I clearly see a procedural gap in the police department. Accusing a man who only posted a photo, reorganizing the search based on an unverified photo, it's a big failure.
Did Orwell teach anything? What will they do with the next Visitors' spaceship photo?
Safeguards are a myth we like to tell ourselves exists so we don't have to reckon with the effects of human agency with tools. Where are the safeguards on knives and guns that make them only usable to hurt bad people?
> Neukgu is part of a programme at O-World to restore the Korean wolf, which once roamed the Korean Peninsula but is now considered extinct in the wild.
I don't understand, shouldn't they have let him go if the idea is that they still roam in the wild? Why forcing it back to a zoo?
Pretty sure if you let only a handful of individuals from an almost-extinct species roam around freely in an uncontrolled environment, chances are pretty high something is going to kill them off before they reproduce, hence why they are almost-extinct.
The zoo provides a controlled environment needed to restore the species.
Also, careful breeding to retain as much genetic diversity as possible is important to avoid collapse in small populations. Even if small local pockets survive, if each pocket is only able to inbreed with itself that will cause problems.
Our local children's museum is part of a network of sites working to restore red wolf [1] populations. Every few years they get new wolves as the coordinators move young wolves around to optimize mating pairs.
Maybe it’s because wolves are genetically dogs and will cross breed and the conservation program supposedly needs to increase the numbers of that particular breed and not just wolves/dogs in general?
He wasn't arrested because he posted an AI photo. He was arrested because he was wasting police time during a genuine problem of the police hunting for a escaped wolf.
He would have been arrested even if the image wasnt AI.
Those chips need to be scanned from about 3cm away. If you want a locator tag, it needs to carry enough power to broadcast a signal a useful distance. Still, a microchip is handy if you're not sure if it's your tiger you found.
South Korea has some very specific (and unusually harsh) laws around deepfakes. I was under the impression that it was only about impersonating people, but apparently it’s broader.
The dude openly admits that he posted the image "for fun", so there was clearly nefarious behavior and purposely wanted to confuse police and the investigation. I don't see why people are trying to defend this dude as him simply "posting a picture of a wolf". I guess people will defend any sort of bad behavior in this day and age.
“Authorities are investigating him for disrupting government work by deception, an offence that carries up to five years in prison or a maximum fine of 10 million Korean won ($6,700; £5,000)”
Somewhat harsher than the UK at least, where “wasting police time” would only get you six months or around a £2500 fine.
So you are saying authorities should ignore public posts unless they are specifically sent to them?
What if another citizen forwarded the image to the police, not knowing it was AI generated? Should it have been ignored because it was not made by the sender? Should it have been ignored because it was forwarded from a public post?
"disrupting government work by deception" sounds like such a busywork charge here trying to do some heavy lifting. An absolutely tough, rough criminal out here...
It is, quite frankly, completely wrong that this man was arrested—if anything, by this line of reasoning, it should have been an artist instead—since AI, as we are told, merely makes copies of what hard-working human artists have already created and shared on the internet.
AI is plagiarism—full stop—nothing more, nothing less.
Of course, this point could have been made without sarcasm (and AI tells for parody)—I’m aware—but that would remove a certain… texture from the argument. And where, exactly, is the fun in that?
There’s something hilariously poetic about a ~2,500 year old fable being relevant today, because of AI.
"South Korean police have arrested a man for sharing an AI-generated image that misled authorities who were searching for a wolf that had broken out of a zoo in Daejeon city.
The 40-year-old unnamed man is accused of disrupting the search by creating and distributing a fake photo purporting to show Neukgu, the wolf, trotting down a road intersection"
To cry wolf is to say there’s a wolf here when it’s actually located elsewhere. The AI photo said there was a wolf at a certain intersection when it was actually located elsewhere.
In fact crying wolf is doubly appropriate because it means disturbing an operation looking for a wolf.
This is misdirection while there is a wolf
Similar but different
That's not pedantic, that's the meaning of the idiom.
¹ Following pronoun variant used in the fine article here.
Original comment was clever and subsequent commenters were uninteresting to me. In this case, I only saw it because I’m on my phone which doesn’t have Chrome extensions. Turns out I’d already blocked them.
Did they? The article says it's unclear as to their intent.
> Authorities did not specify if the man had intentionally sent the photo to authorities during their search or simply shared it online.
And you'll be shocked what the kids have been doing with databases and API calls
Like most important advances like plastics, nuclear power, diesel engines, synthetic fertilizers, computers and the internet, good and bad things came out of it.
It is like saying that plastics screw up everything they touch, for example when a plastic part is used to replace a more durable metal part, but before realizing that plastics are everywhere in our lives, often without a suitable replacement material.
Willfully diverting limited public service resources, that might potentially be assigned to saving someone's life or health?
Practically a social DoS
This is an accurate criticism of the boy in the fable, if... an unnecessary way to express the idea.
I don't care enough to bother finding out, but seems like the BBC could have done some more journalism, if they were so inclined.
If it was true and police saw it but didn’t act, the fallout for them could be much worse depending on the outcome.
With the info presented in the article, it sounds like the cops jumped to conclusions, got publicly embarrassed and are now going after him to either save face or get revenge (depending on how credulous you are of LEO).
The only reason you are seeing this right now is because it has AI in the title.
Hypothetically, if a hacking tool was released that let non-technical people hack into sensitive databases, and then a journalist wrote the headline "local man hacks IRS", without any mention of the tool, wouldn't that be a bit irresponsible, to purposely leave that information out?
Photoshop? I don't think you need much skill.
Have you used Photoshop before? You come across as commenting on something you don't understand.
It’s a crime of opportunity¹, one where you have the idea and act on it on a whim. No opportunity, no crime, and the technology provided the opportunity.
So yes, the technology used matters.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_opportunity
We need to learn/adapt what we post, see, believe in photos to avoid arrest. Especially so in the AI reality because generating these images, and these pranks, has become increasingly easy for anyone to do with no skills and minimal time.
I think the part I find most fascinating though is it’s not clear if he took this picture to the police, actively wasting their time, or if he just posted it and they found it and mistakenly took it as truth. I have no insight to SK laws but for me it’s going to be unfair if they were the ones that used this picture as evidence when if it was never meant to be taken seriously.
If Tesla (insert any car manufacturer you hate) ran over a kid I'd like to see the title say it, instead of "Tesla fined for violating traffic laws."
[1] waiting for some example where fool policemen where outsmarted with simple tricks /s
To answer your question, relative ease is a function, in part, of one's skills & resources, so, it's certainly a reasonable claim to make, but will be different person to person.
Sure a little bit more involved than the two second AI prompt, but 3 min job for the lulz photoshoppers.
There are significantly more people able to type a few words into a prompt than people who can use an image editor fast and convincingly and would be inclined to waste their time on this kind of fake.
But would you? People grumble about $0.99 for an app they’ll use everyday, I doubt paying even $5 (and waiting for a result!) for a fake image to mislead police is high on anyone’s list.
Making this image was likely fast and free. It’s a crime of opportunity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_opportunity
And there are literally billions of everyone else.
Do you not see that the amount of fake images has exploded with free access and ease of use? That’s what a tool does. It’s silly to argue generative AI doesn‘t make a difference in the proliferation of fake images, just like it’d be arguing that digital photography on a small multi-purpose device that is always with you doesn’t make people take more pictures.
What I actually said couldn't be any clearer, and it's rather silly to twist my words into a strawman you can argue against.
I don't know why people are so determined to miss the point that "people can do [image manipulation] faster with AI" does not magically mean that people weren't doing it before AI, at scale mind you. Did y'all really unironically believe EVERY single image you saw on the internet prior to the past few years was entirely real and entirely what it was presented as? My goodness
Needs to be supported by smartphones, of course.
[1] https://contentcredentials.org/
Did Orwell teach anything? What will they do with the next Visitors' spaceship photo?
I don't understand, shouldn't they have let him go if the idea is that they still roam in the wild? Why forcing it back to a zoo?
The zoo provides a controlled environment needed to restore the species.
EDIT: typo/word ordering
Our local children's museum is part of a network of sites working to restore red wolf [1] populations. Every few years they get new wolves as the coordinators move young wolves around to optimize mating pairs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_wolf
https://m.wikitree.co.kr/articles/1132213
He would have been arrested even if the image wasnt AI.
The title and article are very...tabloid-y
You could adjust the firmware of a wildlife tag to start transmitting location every 10 minutes when the animal leaves a geo-fence.
They are also not implanted in the birds, but are a relatively large "backpack" or leg tag.
“Authorities are investigating him for disrupting government work by deception, an offence that carries up to five years in prison or a maximum fine of 10 million Korean won ($6,700; £5,000)”
Somewhat harsher than the UK at least, where “wasting police time” would only get you six months or around a £2500 fine.
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/fir-against-reporter-...
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What if another citizen forwarded the image to the police, not knowing it was AI generated? Should it have been ignored because it was not made by the sender? Should it have been ignored because it was forwarded from a public post?
AI is plagiarism—full stop—nothing more, nothing less.
Of course, this point could have been made without sarcasm (and AI tells for parody)—I’m aware—but that would remove a certain… texture from the argument. And where, exactly, is the fun in that?
If it helps, imagine the text more as a work of art than an instruction manual. Art matters.