this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 276 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (12 children)

A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.

What the actual fuck? You couldn't spare someone to just go look at the fucking thing rather than asking ChatGPT to spin you a tale? What are we even doing here, BBC?

A photo taken by a BBC North West Tonight reporter showed the bridge is undamaged

So they did. Why are we talking about ChatGPT then? You could just leave that part out. It's useless. Obviously a fake photo has been manipulated. Why bother asking?

[–] Deestan@lemmy.world 86 points 1 day ago (17 children)

I tried the image of this real actual road collapse: https://www.tv2.no/nyheter/innenriks/60-mennesker-isolert-etter-veiras/12875776

I told ChatGPT it was fake and asked it to explain why. It assured me I was a special boy asking valid questions and helpfully made up some claims.

collapsed inline media

[–] Atropos@lemmy.world 54 points 1 day ago

God damn I hate this tool.

Thanks for posting this, great example

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[–] IcyToes@sh.itjust.works 65 points 1 day ago

They needed time for their journalists to get there. They're too busy on the beaches counting migrant boat crossings.

[–] BanMe@lemmy.world 53 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am guessing the reporter wanted to remind people tools exist for this, however the reporter isn't tech savvy enough to realize ChatGPT isn't one of them.

[–] 9bananas@feddit.org 25 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

afaik, there actually aren't any reliable tools for this.

the highest accuracy rate I've seen reported for "AI detectors" is somewhere around 60%; barely better than a random guess...

edit: i think that way for text/LLM, to be fair.

kinda doubt images are much better though...happy to hear otherwise, if there are better ones!

[–] rockerface@lemmy.cafe 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The problem is any AI detector can be used to train AI to fool it, if it's publicly available

[–] 9bananas@feddit.org 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

exactly!

using a "detector" is how (not all, but a lot of) AIs (LLMs, GenAI) are trained:

have one AI that's a "student", and one that's a "teacher" and pit them against one another until the student fools the teacher nearly 100% of the time. this is what's usually called "training" an AI.

one can do very funny things with this tech!

for anyone that wants to see this process in action, here's a great example:

Benn Jorda: Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras

[–] Wren@lemmy.today 16 points 1 day ago

My best guess is SEO. Journalism that mentions ChatGPT gets more hits. It might be they did use a specialist or specialized software and the editor was like "Say it was ChatGPT, otherwise people get confused, and we get more views. No one's going to fact check whether or not someone used ChatGPT."

That's just my wild, somewhat informed speculation.

[–] Railcar8095@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Devils advocate, AI might be an agent that detects tapering with a NLP frontend.

Not all AI is LLMs.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 33 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

A "chatbot" is not a specialized AI.

(I feel like maybe I need to put this boilerplate in every comment about AI, but I'd hate that.) I'm not against AI or even chatbots. They have their uses. This is not using them appropriately.

[–] Railcar8095@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

A chatbot can be the user facing side of a specialized agent.

That's actually how original change bots were. Siri didn't know how to get the weather, it was able to classify the question as a weather question, parse time and location and which APIs to call on those cases.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (14 children)

Okay I get you're playing devil's advocate here, but set that aside for a moment. Is it more likely that BBC has a specialized chatbot that orchestrates expert APIs including for analyzing photos, or that the reporter asked ChatGPT? Even in the unlikely event I'm wrong, what is the message to the audience? That ChatGPT can investigate just as well as BBC. Which may well be the case, but it oughtn't be.

My second point still stands. If you sent someone to look at the thing and it's fine, I can tell you the photo is fake or manipulated without even looking at the damn thing.

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[–] Tuuktuuk@piefed.ee 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There's hoping that the reporter then looked at the image and noticed, "oh, true! That's an obvious spot there!"

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[–] mavu@discuss.tchncs.de 78 points 1 day ago (7 children)

A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.

WTF?

Doesn't the fucking BBC have at least 1 or 2 experts for spotting fakes? RAN THROUGH AN AI CHATBOT?? SERIOUSLY??

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 42 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They have vibe journalists now

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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 points 1 day ago

They do, they have like a daily article debunking shit.

[–] bilgamesch@feddit.org 5 points 17 hours ago

People need to get that with the proliferation of AI the only way to build credibility is not by using it for trust but to go the exact opposite way: Grab your shoes and go places. Make notes. Take images.

As AI permeates the digital space - a process that is unlikely to be reversed - everything that's human will need to get - figuratively speaking - analogue again.

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[–] alexsantee@infosec.pub 74 points 1 day ago (6 children)

It's a shame to see the journalist trusting an AI chat-bot to verify the trustworthiness of the image instead of asking a specialist. I feel like they should even have an AI detecting specialist in-house since we're moving to having more generative AI material everywhere

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[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 57 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It is time to start holding social media sites liable for posting AI deceptions. FB is absolutely rife with them.

[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

Disagree. Without Section 230 (or equivalent laws of their respective jurisdictions) your Fediverse instance would be forced to moderate even harder in fear of legal action. I mean, who even decides what "AI deception" is? your average lemmy.world mod, an unpaid volunteer?

It's a threat to free speech.

[–] 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 day ago

Also, it would be trivial for big tech to flood every fediverse instance with deceptive content and get us all shut down

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[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 11 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

YouTube has been getting much worse lately as well. Lots of purported late-breaking Ukraine war news that's nothing but badly-written lies. Same with reports of Trump legal defeats that haven't actually happened. They are flooding the zone with shit, and poisoning search results with slop.

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I think just the people need to held accountable as while I am no fan of Meta, it is not their responsibility to hold people legally accountable to what they choose to post. What we really need is zero knowledge proof tech to identity a person is real without having to share their personal information but that breaks Meta’s and other free business model so here we are.

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[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 39 points 1 day ago (4 children)

WTF? Why nothing like this ever happened during Photoshop times? Are people just dumber now?

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because the venn diagram of “people who would maliciously do something like this” and “people with good enough photoshop skills to make it look realistic” were nearly two separate circles. AI has added a third “people with access to AI image generators” circle, and it has a LOT of overlap with the second group simply because it is so large.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Really? I remember tons of nicely photoshoped pictures on Snopes. There was a lot of trolling by people with skills going on.

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 6 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Those remained on email chains. Unlike social media of today where anyone can generate any image and send it to millions of gullible people in a second.

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[–] Rhoeri@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

It doesn’t require skill anymore. AI has enabled children with the ability to pretend they have a skill, and to use it to fool people for fun.

[–] Vitaly@feddit.uk 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The thing is you actually need some skill to do it in Photoshop, but now every dumb fuck who knows how to read can do shit like this.

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These are more realistic and far far easier to make.

People who post this stuff without identifying it as fake should be held liable.

[–] rami@ani.social 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm surprised to see no one else mention that it only took them an hour and a half to get an inspection done, signed of on and the lines reopened? That seems pretty impressive for something as important as a rail bridge.

[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I mean, it's the time to get an inspector off of bed, on the road, to the site, and for them to go “yup, bridge's still there” and call back...

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For anyone outside the UK, the bridge in the picture is carrying the West Coast Mainline (WCML).

The UK basically has two major routes between Edinburgh and Glasgow (where most people live in Scotland) and London, the East Coast Mainline and the West Coast Mainline. They also connect several major cities and regions.

The person who posted this basically claimed that a bridge on one of the UK's busiest intercity rail routes had started to collapse, which is not something you say lightly. It's like saying all of New York's airports had shut down because of three co-incidental sinkholes.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 15 points 1 day ago

Wait until this shit starts an actual war.

[–] sircac@lemmy.world 12 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

It feels like a privilege escalation exploit: at a certain point the authority chain jumped from a random picture provided who knows where/when to a link in the chain that should be reliable enough to blindly trust in this subject.

[–] Dozzi92@lemmy.world 8 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

I dunno, someone just throws this up on social media, and you're the person in the position to say hey, halt the trains, don't you do just that out of an abundance of caution?

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 6 points 12 hours ago

lives are worth more than the dysfunction caused by the delay in services.

the only thing this did was to weaken the resolution of leadership when a real disaster happens.

the next time information like this comes forward, be it real or fake, it will cause a delayed reaction which will ultimately cost lives.

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[–] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 day ago

I mean, even if it isn't true, better to be sure than to have a train derail and kill a bunch of people.

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