Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image

To be clear, you don't need AI for this.

You can also just call the railroad and report the bridge as damaged.

Hoaxes and pranks and fake threats have been around forever.

That leaves much more of a paper trail. People routinely are fined and jailed for pulling off such "pranks", partially because "fake threats"/"abuse of emergency response resources" are an exception to many freedom-of-speech laws.

A fake photo of a collapsed bridge however won't cross that criminal threshold.

Again, I see this argument.

“Bad X has happened before and unsolved. Why worry about bad X^2?”

Personally I’d prefer if it remained at X so solutions can catch up. But that’s just me.

You also don't need gunpowder to kill someone with projectiles, but gunpowder changed things in important ways. All I ever see are the most specious knee-jerk defenses of AI that immediately fall apart.

I think the implication is we already handle these events well enough pre-ai, and that the events are not necessarily more disruptive just because an ai was used to trigger them.

Implicit in this though is the assumption that the increase in awareness of these events has more to do with an ai being involved rather than the event actually being exceptional.

It's not clear to me that it "changed things in important ways" in this case if a call alleging serious damage to the rail would've similarly triggered a pause for inspection.

A phone call to railway management claiming stone fall on a track, a dead cow, a stalled car, etc will trigger a slowdown on that line, a call to the driver, and an inspection.

If that's not happening then management is playing fast and loose with legal responsibility and the risks of mass and inertia.

Yep, why give people computers? It just increases the number of bad X, before writing these type of hoaxes were much less common.

I see room for a platform that only does auth, reviews and perhaps indexing.

Since you didnt ask, let me needlessly elaborate.

You can have YouTube or X or Facebook "design" a web page for you but those are always extremely lame. Just have websites in stead?? Their moderation looks more like a zombie shooter. Wikipedia has some kind of internet trial but that is so unsophisticated that it might even be worse.

It could be a simple redaction with a number of seats that can be emptied when the users request it though a random selection of jurors.

The redaction makes suggestions and eventually removes your website.

The site can still be publicly available before and after, it just doesnt live in the index.

If you create a fake photo/video with intent to cause disruption it absolutely crosses the threshold.

Intent is a valid legal concept. Certainly there's no way to try "swatting" without crossing that line of intent, but (for example) less-threatening prank phone calls can be in the grey area.

I presume there is established legal practice for handling these kinds of things, but for generative images the legal limits won't achieve wide awareness until some teenagers and assorted morons get hauled into court.

intent is very difficult to prove.

"I was just memeing, sir"

It's not about the possibility, it's about probability. People are posting more fake images and videos than ever before. More is categorically different.

I love hoaxes. But this also neglects the social and viral aspect. If lets say if an aged local member for parliament sees an image of the bridge after coming back from the pub, he will call into the authorities responsible. Now you can think of many other people who, upon seeing this, and having an initial reaction to it, have the power to enforce an action.

Calling directly into the railroad bypasses an authority chain. It negates the virality of it. These viral images are viral because they get shared and spread on their own just like a virus.

Telephone calls into authorities were never viral, they could never be spread. Although they may well have caused the desired reaction without spreading first! Many hoaxes back in the day were somewhat viral and did get spread, but the hoax went to the newspapers or the community first and spread there. A well crafted press release, some additional letters to the traditional media etc. A believable image makes for more believability. The hoax got spread because it was hard to debunk it as it was distributed before the debunking. Bypassing the effort to spread the hoax removes chances of effects.

Edits: my initial thought was "no trains run after midnight anyhow" as except on a few main lines its hard to find trains in the UK at night - so the cost of the bridge closure may have been very small. That with the amount and quality of the staff operating at that time of night. Taken together this leads to less of a cost of reaction, more of a chance of a knee jerk reaction from staff, less ability to consult nearby awake engineers and survey damage IRL. So while the hoaxers cannot plan an earthquake(!) it probably wouldn't have succeeded if the earthquake happened at 11am.

Any hoax can be easily fought, if the punishment of getting caught is severe enough.

The problem is the justice system, that is optimized to protect a criminal and to offload the costs to the society, which is happy to be distracted with identity and moral supemacy arguments.

What you're probably failing to grasp is that all technology is good, and AI is technology, therefore AI is good. Notable examples are the printing press and the automobile. Would you prefer a world without those things? How ridiculous!

Please ignore "technology" such as leaded gasoline and CFCs. No one could have known those were harmful, anyway.

If you create one to prank your friend, and he ends up falling for it and sharing it in another group, and it gets to someone who alerts the authorities, without including the context of "this was sent to me by a guy who's a bit of a joker", and railway management's policy is to take all reports seriously rather than verifying their provenance...I find it hard to think anyone in that chain should really be held liable.

The person who alerts the authorities should be held liable - they had the option to verify before doing so, but chose not to.