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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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?
“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.
Are you trying to tell me, in this the year of our lord 2026, somebody has been (rightfully or wrongfully) arrested for literally ‘crying wolf’?
There’s something hilariously poetic about a ~2,500 year old fable being relevant today, because of AI.
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.
Crying wolf is normally starting the operation while there isn‘t a wolf.
This is misdirection while there is a wolf
Similar but different
That's completely pedantic and besides it's false because there literally wasn't a wolf there where he faked the photo in the first place
Crying wolf is crying for help when there is no danger not when there is a danger just at different place.
That's not pedantic, that's the meaning of the idiom.
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.
But this isn't a false alert. The alert is real, people just got misdirected.
This is real life there's always a danger just at a different place.
what if the real criers of wolves were the sheeple we misled along the way?
le reddit mentality
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.
If this was America there would be 20 think pieces in the Atlantic about how AI is ruining our culture and no one would get arrested.
> the person dusturbed the operation
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.
Intent or not, it did disturb as it misslead. And .. how can one imagine to not disturb a search, when posting a wrong location?
There was a real wolf in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", too.
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.
> It's also a nice illustration of how LLMs screw up everything they touch
And you'll be shocked what the kids have been doing with databases and API calls
???
Is there a reason you felt the need to slip this non sequitur in your reply?
I am not sure, but it probably isn't because I wanted to sound smart by using smart sounding words :)
> somebody has been (rightfully or wrongfully) arrested for literally ‘crying wolf’?
Willfully diverting limited public service resources, that might potentially be assigned to saving someone's life or health?
Practically a social DoS
Yeah, I really don't see the difference with false bomb alerts.
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.
That was the impression I got as well, but it seems like other people disagree.
Title should be "Man arrested for deceptive and antisocial behavior".
The only reason you are seeing this right now is because it has AI in the title.
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?
> Presumably this person wouldn't have been able to do this before AI.
Photoshop? I don't think you need much skill.
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...
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.
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.
So yes, the technology used matters.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_opportunity
The one time the headline isn't misleading, you want it changed?
Yes, it's an interesting and novel thing about a topic many people here are interested in.
I so wish this were true. Put AI in the title, garner instant attention.
That would be so vague as to be useless.
Except the actual title here is clearer. Your suggestion is so anti-AI-clickbait that it overflew and became a bad title again.
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."
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
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?
How about not believing everything that's posted to the Internet. This could've easily been done with Photoshop in the pre AI era.
"easily" is doing some heavy lifting there. Is Photoshopping this image together really easier than prompting an AI?
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.
I could never do it without investing a large amount of time into PS, and getting stressed a lot in the meanwhile.
And they easily could have been arrested for making photoshops of the same event.
Get used to it, it's gonna keep happening since we're dumb enough to create a technology that mirrors reality with no safeguards whatsoever.
Oh actually penalizing people does help
And if the person isn't in your country?
Penalizing people is slow and does not scale as much as AI creations that can be mass produced.
> 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.
EDIT: typo/word ordering
They live in a pretty big conservatory (korean link but you can see the pictures)
https://m.wikitree.co.kr/articles/1132213
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?
I'm a little surprised zoo animals aren't chipped with some kind of beacon locator for incidents such as these.
What sort of size do you think that would be?
Small and low energy enough that tiny migratory birds can wear them for months. Externally worn of course (e.g. attached to the ear, for a wolf).
You could adjust the firmware of a wildlife tag to start transmitting location every 10 minutes when the animal leaves a geo-fence.
Bird ones are easy because birds are high in the air, so there's nothing to block the signal.
They are also not implanted in the birds, but are a relatively large "backpack" or leg tag.
size of chip? they're tiny. dog owners typically have the vet "chip" their pet as a puppy. full-grown dog doesn't need a bigger chip.
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.
Those chips cannot track a dog's location
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.
I think many places, even without specific deepfake laws, would prosecute someone who used a fake image to mislead the police.
Need this in the west as well
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?
The amount of punctuation and terrible sentence structure make this nearly incomprehensible.
Yeh, I might have went overboard with the snark here. It seems even the line hinting that this was snarky was lost.
If it helps, imagine the text more as a work of art than an instruction manual. Art matters.
This is how the future will look!
What is the charge?
The article says:
“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.
IMO you should be legally required to disclose that a video has been AI generated when you share it.