From outer space? Sask. farmers baffled after discovering strange wreckage in field
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump getting gang-tackled by riot-gear-clad New York City police officers. Russian President Vladimir Putin in prison greys behind the bars of a dimly lit concrete cell.
The highly detailed, sensational images have inundated Twitter and other platforms in recent days, amid news that Trump faces possible criminal charges and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin.
But neither visual is remotely real. The images -- and scores of variations littering social media -- were produced using increasingly sophisticated and widely accessible image generators powered by artificial intelligence.
Misinformation experts warn the images are harbingers of a new reality: waves of fake photos and videos flooding social media after major news events and further muddying fact and fiction at crucial times for society.
"It does add noise during crisis events. It also increases the cynicism level," said Jevin West, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who focuses on the spread of misinformation. "You start to lose trust in the system and the information that you are getting."
While the ability to manipulate photos and create fake images isn't new, AI image generator tools by Midjourney, DALL-E and others are easier to use. They can quickly generate realistic images -- complete with detailed backgrounds -- on a mass scale with little more than a simple text prompt from users.
Some of the recent images have been driven by this month's release of a new version of Midjourney's text-to-image synthesis model, which can, among other things, now produce convincing images mimicking the style of news agency photos.
In one widely-circulating Twitter thread, Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism collective, used the latest version of the tool to conjure up scores of dramatic images of Trump's fictional arrest.
The visuals, which have been shared and liked tens of thousands of times, showed a crowd of uniformed officers grabbing the Republican billionaire and violently pulling him down onto the pavement.
Higgins, who was also behind a set of images of Putin being arrested, put on trial and then imprisoned, says he posted the images with no ill intent. He even stated clearly in his Twitter thread that the images were AI-generated.
Still, the images were enough to get him locked out of the Midjourney server, according to Higgins. The San Francisco-based independent research lab didn't respond to emails seeking comment.
"The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes," Higgins wrote in an email. "The images started to form a sort of narrative as I plugged in prompts to Midjourney, so I strung them along into a narrative, and decided to finish off the story."
He pointed out the images are far from perfect: in some, Trump is seen, oddly, wearing a police utility belt. In others, faces and hands are clearly distorted.
But it's not enough that users like Higgins clearly state in their posts that the images are AI-generated and solely for entertainment, says Shirin Anlen, media technologist at Witness, a New York-based human rights organization that focuses on visual evidence.
Too often, the visuals are quickly reshared by others without that crucial context, she said. Indeed, an Instagram post sharing some of Higgins' images of Trump as if they were genuine garnered more than 79,000 likes.
"You're just seeing an image, and once you see something, you cannot unsee it," Anlen said.
In another recent example, social media users shared a synthetic image supposedly capturing Putin kneeling and kissing the hand of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The image, which circulated as the Russian president welcomed Xi to the Kremlin this week, quickly became a crude meme.
It's not clear who created created the image or what tool they used, but some clues gave the forgery away. The heads and shoes of the two leaders were slightly distorted, for example, and the room's interior didn't match the room where the actual meeting took place.
With synthetic images becoming increasingly difficult to discern from the real thing, the best way to combat visual misinformation is better public awareness and education, experts say.
"It's just becoming so easy and it's so cheap to make these images that we should do whatever we can to make the public aware of how good this technology has gotten," West said.
Higgins suggests social media companies could focus on developing technology to detect AI-generated images and integrate that into their platforms.
Twitter has a policy banning "synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media" with the potential to deceive or harm. Annotations from Community Notes, Twitter's crowd-sourced fact checking project, were attached to some tweets to include the context that the Trump images were AI-generated.
When reached for comment Thursday, the company emailed back only an automated response.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment. Some of the fabricated Trump images were labeled as either "false" or "missing context" through its third-party fact-checking program, of which the AP is a participant.
Arthur Holland Michel, a fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York who is focused on emerging technologies, said he worries the world isn't ready for the impending deluge.
He wonders how deepfakes involving ordinary people -- harmful fake pictures of an ex-partner or a colleague, for example -- will be regulated.
"From a policy perspective, I'm not sure we're prepared to deal with this scale of disinformation at every level of society," Michel wrote in an email. "My sense is that it's going to take an as-yet-unimagined technical breakthrough to definitively put a stop to this."
------
Associated Press reporter David Klepper in Washington contributed to this story.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
The National Post is reporting that Rex Murphy, the pundit and columnist who hosted a national call-in radio show for decades, has died.
Another suspect is in custody in connection with the gold heist at Toronto Pearson International Airport last year, police say.
Careful attention to government statements and legislation is required to get a handle on the level of risk British Columbians’ information is under, as investigators probe multiple breaches under a continued barrage of attacks.
A southwestern Ontario woman has received an $8,400 bill from a hospital in Windsor, Ont., after she refused to put her mother in a nursing home she hated -- and she says she has no intention of paying it.
A Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre would not legislate on, nor use the notwithstanding clause, on abortion, his office says, as anti-abortion protesters gather on Parliament Hill.
Hailey and Justin Bieber are going to be parents. The couple announced the news on Thursday on Instagram, both sharing a video that showcases Hailey Bieber's growing belly.
Studies have shown that ultraprocessed foods can have a detrimental impact on health. But 30 years of research show they don’t all have the same impact.
The Oscar-winning team behind the nearly US$6 billion blockbuster 'Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' trilogies is reuniting to produce two new films.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.