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?
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.
God damn I hate this tool.
Thanks for posting this, great example
Wait, you’re surprised it did what you asked of it?
There’s a massive difference between asking if something is fake, and telling it it is and asking why.
A person would make the same type of guesses and explanations if given the same task.
All this is showing is, you and ALOT of other people just don’t know enough about AI to be able to have a conversation about it.
It even says “suggests” in it, it’s making no claim that it’s real or fake. The lack of basic comprehension is the issue here.
A person would have the agency to ask, " why do you think it’s fake?"
Why would it have to? It and the person doing the task already knows to do any task put in front of it. It’s one of a hundred photos for all it and the person knows.
You are extending context and instructions that doesn’t exist. The situation would be, both are doing whatever task is presented to them. A human asking would fail and be removed. They failed order number one.
You could also setup a situation where the ai and human were both capable of asking. The ai won’t do what it’s not asked, that’s the comprehension lacking.
When people use a conversational tool, they expect it to act human, which it INTENTIONALLY DOES but without the sanity of a real human.
It’s not a conversation tool when you present it with a specific task….
Do you not understand even the basic premise of how ai works?
When we are talking about LLM chat bots, they have a conversational interface. I am not talking about other types of machine learning. I don’t have time to keep responding.
I think if a person were asked to do the same they would actually look at the image and make genuine remarks, look at the points it has highlighted, the boxes are placed around random points and the references to those boxes are unrelated (ie. yellow talks about branches when there are no branches near the yellow box, red talks about bent guardrail when the red box on the guardrail is of an undamaged section)
It has just made up points that “sound correct”, anyone actually looking at this can tell there is no intelligence behind this
Yet that wasn’t the point they even made! Lmfao nice reaching there.
Those would be the same type of points a human would make to accomplish the task.
You seem to be ignoring the facts. It was told the image was fake, and told to explain why. Even a human that knows it’s real would still do what was presented to it.
The person told the ai a very specific thing to do, with not room for variance, it wasn’t even stated as a question, they made a demand and any human in the same position would act the same way. If you’re expecting to have to tell a human a 100 times that “yes the image is real, can you do the task presented” is more efficient and better then it being done?
Now you could also present the task as both being able to question it, the ai would follow instructions better.
Back to situation one, while with the human you would be constantly interrupted, is that a good employee or subject? Or one you would immediately replace as it can’t even follow basic instructions? Ai or human, you would point to do the task at hand, yes critical thinking is important, but not for this stupid task. Stop applying instructions and context that never existed in the first place. In a one for one example, the Ai would question too, if you can’t understand this, you shouldn’t be commenting on Ai.
Ai sucks, but don’t ignore reality to make your asinine point.
Wait, you’re surprised it did what you asked of it?
No. Stop making things up to complain about. Or at least leave me out of it.
Then what are doing? Complaining it did exactly what you instructed it to do?
What else did you expect?
I get circle jerking against ai is hip and fun, but this isn’t even one of the valid errors it makes. This is just pure human error lmfao.
clearly, they asked it a question that average joe would do, and has shown that again its full of overly confident lies. it did not just reinforce the original belief of the user that it is fake, but it also hallucinated there a bunch of professional-like statements that are false if you take the time to check them. most people won’t check them though, and straight up believe what it just spit out and think “oh this is so smart! outrageous that people call me dumb for asking it life advice!”
But they didn’t ask it a question… They specifically told it the image was fake and explain why. That’s not a question, that’s a task.
clearly, they asked it a question that average joe would do
Clearly (as you so incorrectly pointed out a question….)The lack of basic reading comprehension being shown here exactly explains the issue perfectly.
It’s not people relying on it, it’s people using it for stuff it’s not meant for!
They needed time for their journalists to get there. They’re too busy on the beaches counting migrant boat crossings.
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.
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!
The problem is any AI detector can be used to train AI to fool it, if it’s publicly available
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:
Someone commented a reply which I thought worthy of highlighting:
“I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are.”
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.
Devils advocate, AI might be an agent that detects tapering with a NLP frontend.
Not all AI is LLMs.
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.
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.
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.
If the article were written 10 years ago I would’ve just assumed they had used something like:
It’s not like BBC is a single person with no skill other than a driving license and at least one functional eye.
Hell, they don’t even need to go, just call the local services.
For me it’s most likely that they have a specialized tool than an LLM detecting correctly tampering with the photo.
But if you say it’s unlikely you’re wrong, then I must be wrong I guess.
what is the message to the audience? That ChatGPT can investigate just as well as BBC.
What about this part?
Either it’s irresponsible to use ChatGPT to analyze the photo or it’s irresponsible to present to the reader that chatbots can do the job. Particularly when they’ve done the investigation the proper way.
Deliberate or not, they are encouraging Facebook conspiracy debates by people who lead AI to tell them a photo is fake and think that’s just as valid as BBC reporting.
I don’t think it’s irresponsible to suggest to readers that they can use an AI chatbot to examine any given image to see if it was AI-generated. Even the lowest-performing multi-model chatbots (e.g. Grok and ChatGPT) can do that pretty effectively.
Also: Why stop at one? Try a whole bunch! Especially if you’re a reporter working for the BBC!
It’s not like they give an answer, “yes: Definitely fake” or “no: Definitely real.” They will analyze the image and give you some information about it such as tell-tale signs that an image could have been faked.
But why speculate? Try it right fucking now: Ask ChatGPT or Gemini (the current king at such things BTW… For the next month at least hahaha) if any given image is fake. It only takes a minute or two to test it out with a bunch of images!
Then come back and tell us that’s irresponsible with some screenshots demonstrating why.
About that part I would say the article doesn’t mention ChatGPT, only AI.
ChatGPT is a fronted for specialized modules.
If you e.g. ask it to do maths, it will not do it via LLM but run it through a maths module.
I don’t know for a fact whether it has a photo analysis module, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t.
There’s hoping that the reporter then looked at the image and noticed, “oh, true! That’s an obvious spot there!”
But the stories of Russians under my bed stealing my washing machine’s CPU are totally real.
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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??
They have vibe journalists now
don’t make me cry.
They do, they have like a daily article debunking shit.
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.
No, they only have transphobia experts.
I haven’t read it, but it could be to demonstrate how easy it was to identify it as a fake, without the ressources of BBC.
Pr because it was between 0 and 2 in the night. Still, as an author I wouldn’t have mentioned it.
An “expert” could be anyone who convinces someone else to pay them. The “expert” is probably the one that ran it through the chatbot.
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
If the part of the image that reveals the image was made by an AI is obvious enough, why contact a specialist? Of course, reporters should absolutely be trained to spot such things with their bare eyes without something telling them specifically where to look. But still, once the reporter can already see what’s ridiculously wrong in the image, it would be waste of the specialist’s time to call them to come look at the image.
What does that chatbot add?
My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.
I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.
It is implied in the article that the chatbot was able to point out details about the image that the reporter either could not immediately recognize without some kind of outside help or did not bother looking for.
So, the chatbot added making the reporter notice something on the photo in a few seconds that would have taken several minutes for the reporter to notice without aid of technology.
It’s not a shame. Have you tried this? Try it now! It only takes a minute.
Test a bunch of images against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Ask it if the image was AI-generated. I think you’ll be surprised.
Gemini is the current king of that sort of image analysis but the others should do well too.
What do you think the experts use? LOL! They’re going to run an image through the same exact process that the chatbots would use plus some additional steps if they didn’t find anything obvious on the first pass.
WTF? Why nothing like this ever happened during Photoshop times? Are people just dumber now?
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.
Really? I remember tons of nicely photoshoped pictures on Snopes. There was a lot of trolling by people with skills going on.
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.
So? People with skill don’t troll? Clearly the dumb person here is the one who believed the fake. What does someone else’s skill has to do with it?
It took skill to do this before. Hardly anyone with that level of skill and time would do this. Now the dumb idiots have access to that skillset because of AI doing all the work for them.
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.
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.
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…
For a “once in decades” event you would normally expect that people aren’t really on call to respond in a few minutes.
For an rail network that runs 24/7 they’re going to have crews specifically to wake up should there be a problem on the busiest sections of mainline as this hoax indicated there were. That’s a significant amount of dollars burned if they close the line due to a citizen reporting heavy damage to the bridge, and just waiting until 8am on the next business day to actually look at anything.
I strongly suspect what happened was they woke up their on-call inspectors (or scrambled an inspector who worked nights, which a rail network may very well have) informed them of photos circulating showing significant structural damage to this 150 year old viaduct, so they roll up and see the exact same viaduct in the exact same shape it’s been in for their entire life and call up their boss and say “oy you wakin me up for this shiv? The bridge is bloody fine! Check your sauces mate!” (And after reporting that it was a hoax probably went and did a more thorough inspection to make sure their bases were covered)
Wait until this shit starts an actual war.
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.
A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.
This is terrifying. Does the BBC not have anyone on the team that understands why this does not, and will never work?
Got em.
AI creating jobs by requiring more human intervention for validation of previously reliable forms of information?
Okay cool, I’m here for it.
