Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image

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

The image is likely AI generated in this case, but this does not seem like the best strategy for finding out if an image is AI generated.

Under the other photos it says A photo taken by a BBC North West Tonight reporter showed the bridge is undamaged and A BBC North West reporter visited the bridge today and confirmed it was undamaged

They may have first ran the photo through an AI, but they also went out to verify. Or ran it after verification to understand it better, maybe

It's not, but when you have 30 minutes to ship a story...

Yeah, talk about begging the question. Yikes.

So.. is this where the AI hype train starts to lose steam? One AI hallucinated and caused the incident, and another AI program just wasted everyone's time after it was unable to verify the issue. Sounds like AI was utterly useless to everyone involved.

> Sounds like AI was utterly useless to everyone involved.

Not the hoaxer!

> Sounds like AI was utterly useless to everyone involved

Maybe.

Imo, I think the advances in AI and the hype toward generated everything will actually be the current societies digitally-obsessed course-correction back to having a greater emphases on things like theater, live music, conversing with people in-person or even strangers (the horror, I know) simply to connect/consume more meaningfully. It'll level out integrating both instead of being so digitally loop-sided as humans adapt to enjoy both.*

To me, this shows a need for more local journalism that has been decimated by the digital world. By journalism, I mean it in a more traditional sense, not bloggers and podcast (no shade some follow principled, journalistic integrity -- as some national "traditional" one don't). Local journalism is usually held to account by the community, and even though the worldwide BBC site has this story, it was the local reporters they had that were able to verify. If these AI stories/events accelerate a return to local reporting with a worldwide audience, then all the better.

* I try to be a realist, but when I err, it tends to be on the optimist side

This is the fast way they can try, but it shouldn't be the most trustworthy way and shouldn't be in report.

The tech giants sucking up all the ad revenue is what killed local journalism. Unless you can find a solution to that problem (or an alternstove fundong model), it's not coming back.

Someone I know is a high school English teacher (being vague because I don’t want to cause them trouble or embarrassment). They told me they were asking ChatGPT to tell them whether their students’ creative writing assignments were AI-generated or not-I pointed out that LLMs such as ChatGPT have poor reliability at this; classifier models trained specifically for this task perform somewhat better, yet also have their limitations. In any event, if the student has access to whatever model the teacher is using to test for AI-generation (or even comparable models), they can always respond adversarially by tinkering with an AI-generated story until it is no longer classified as AI-generated

Reminds me of a Reddit story that made the rounds about a professor asking ChatGPT if it wrote papers, to which it frequently responded afirmatively. He sent an angry email about it, and a student responded by showing a response from ChatGPT claiming it wrote his email.

Yeah that hardly talks of the "journalist" being good at their job. At worst they asked a biased question like "has this photo been AI generated and if then how" or worse.

People tend to think that AI is like a specific kind of human which knows other AI things better. But we should expect better from people that do writing as their job.

If it's nano banana you can give it to Gemini bc it has artifacts

> One AI hallucinated and caused the incident

I suspect that AI was prompted to create the image, not that this was an incidental "hallucination".

Cynical-me suspects this may have been a trial run by malicious actors experimenting with disrupting critical infrastructure.

ChatGPT: This looks like AI. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a bit of training data in my time.

> student responded by showing a response from ChatGPT claiming it wrote his email

Which is actually fine. Students need to do their own homework. A teacher can delegate writing emails.

I believe you just got whooshed.

A New York lawyer used ChatGPT to write a filing with references to fake cases. After a human told him they were hallucinated, he asked ChatGPT if that was true (which said they were real cases). He then screenshotted that answer and submitted it to the judge with the explanation "ChatGPT ... assured the reliability of its content." https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63107798/54/mata-v-avia... (pages 19, 41-43)

But if he didn't delegate, and it said he did, that would suggest that the methodology doesn't really work.

But just think of all the people that didn’t have to receive a paycheck because of all this efficiency!

It’s really incredible how the supposedly unassailable judgement of mass consumer preference consistently leads our society to produce worse shit so we can have more or it, and rewards the chief enshittifiers with mega yachts.

You missed the entire point lol

A person arguing in favor of LLM use failed to comprehend the context or argument? Unpossible!

There is precedent for state actors putting a lot of effort into a hoax like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Chemicals_Plant_expl...

They have powerful untaxed monopolies in excess of the economic value tech companies themselves generate.

At some point, the value of their services come from the people who use their sites.

I hope he was disbarred.

He was probably offered a role at some ai obsessed firm because of his “ai-native workflow”.

All these tool integrations are making it increasingly difficult to explain to non-tech people what these chatbots are capable of. Even more so as multi-modality improves (at some point image generation went from a distinct tool to arguably an inherent part the the models).

Students (and some of my coworkers) are now learning new content by reading AI generated text. Of course when tested on this, they are going to respond in the style of AI.

I don't think I was arguing for LLMs. I wish nobody used them. But the argument against a student using it for assignments is significantly different than that against people in general using them. It's similar to using a calculator or asking someone else for the answer: fine normally but not if the goal is to demonstrate that you learned/know something.

I admit I missed the joke. I read it as the usual "you hypocrite teacher, you don't want us using tools but you use them" argument I see. There's no need to be condescending towards me for that. I see now that the "joke" was about the unreliability of AI checkers and making the teacher really angry by suggesting that their impassioned email wasn't even their writing, bolstered by their insistence that checkers are reliable.

Yes, I missed the student using the teacher's trust in those tools to make them even more angry and neuter their angry email that they (probably) actually wrote themselves. Well-played.

Yeah, I'm really sorry. I didn't realize it would upset so many people.

Apologies to everyone I upset by this comment. It was just an innocent mis-reading of the joke. Lesson learned.

Or sent to court-ordered LLM Awareness classes.

Do you not think even BBC "journalists" are suffering from immense pressures to use AI for efficiency? It's everywhere

I realize you might have failed to comprehend the level of my argument. It wasn't even about LLMs in particular, rather having someone/something else do your work for you. I read it as the student criticizing the teacher for not writing his own emails, since the teacher criticizes the students for not writing their own classwork. Whether it's an LLM or them hiring someone else to do the writing, this is what my rebuttal applied to. I saw what I thought was flawed reasoning and wanted to correct it. I hope it's clear why a student using an LLM (or another person) to write classwork is far more than a quality issue, whereas someone not being tested/graded using an LLM to prepare written material is "merely" a quality issue (and the personal choice to atrophy their mental fitness).

Yeah, it is frankly just plain bad epistemology to expect an AI chatbot to have answers on a matter such as this. Like trying to get this week's lotto numbers by seeking a reading in bible passages and verses. There is no way that the information was encoded within in there as it would violate causality. At best you'd have coincidental collisions only.

I'm just worried he was tapped for a position in the current administration.

Two posts from you addressing a one-line reply? May be time to put down the coffee and take a drag from the mood-altering-substance of your preference.