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Comment by _fw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It was a false alert in that particular place. I doubt those residents who were alerted had felt like they were previously in immediate danger.

You don't get to chose pedanticism when it suits you. Please stop.

Not pedanticism. Pedantry.

/joke

Think of it like this: if this same story was happening a couple of centuries ago, pre-Internet, this person who just got arrested would have been sitting at their balcony, crying "the wolf is here! down at the intersection!" ; causing the hunting team to waste time.

Well it's definitely a false alert but I think maybe I see what's bugging you. If an enemy agent intentionally did that with the goal of disrupting operations we'd call it misdirection and it seems a bit silly in that scenario to also categorize it as crying wolf. Since there's an ongoing search that the guy was aware of you view this the same way.

But have you considered that the criteria arose organically as opposed to being engineered top down to account for edge cases such as this? I think in practice the term can probably apply to any instance where you might consider the longer term reputation of an individual or group that is separate from the response team.

Basically you've decided the two things must be mutually exclusive but haven't provided any reasoning or precedent for that constraint.

Must not have paid close attention to the details of the story.

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.

> 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 not disturb a search, when posting a wrong location?

Intent or not, disturbing the search or not, it's silly that the authorities would arrest a civilian because of their own incompetence.

Civilians get arrested for incompetence all the time.

That's the true core of the story. Was the man truly trying to mislead authorities or is it more about authorities using the man as a scapegoat to hide their incompetence.

They were searching for a wolf. (Not really a standard task)

They don't have total surveillance, so also rely on public information

- a citicien posts information about the location of the wolf, a picture!

- authorities adopt their search based on that picture

Where is the incompetence here?

I swear, some commenters here think "the government is incompetent" is an axiom and work backward from there to fill in the details.

Everyone involved in this including the police are civilians

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.

There was a real wolf in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", too.

what an incredibly dumb thread this is. OP pointed out something amusing and it's being ruined by completely useless pedantry

Welcome to HN, I guess

I'm honestly not convinced that it isn't just LLMs going in circles with each other

Serious suggestion: we flag responses or have a separate flag for comments which are unnecessarily pedantic / the commenter is functionally illiterate / the commenter didn't read (the three things are somewhat indistinguishable).

I find that building a personal blocklist extension for myself lets me treat such threads as fertile grounds. I no longer get annoyed because I am pleased that I can quickly remove a lot of low quality commenters at once. Recommend writing one for yourself (trivial with LLM).

Original comment was clever and subsequent commenters were uninteresting to me. In this case, I only saw it because I’m on my phone which doesn’t have Chrome extensions. Turns out I’d already blocked them.

Well, I was a bit missled by the original comment, then I read the article, found the case to be a bit different than the tale and posted context. But giving the pedantry nature of HN, I should have probably been more clear in my wording to avoid the debate about meaning of words. Because yes, there is a resemblance to the fable, just not literally the same.

I think people are just traumatized the content they've consumed from reddit so anything that reminds them of it, such as OP, triggers something in them because HN is starting to feel the same.

Don't even link me to the comment about how this has always been a complaint on HN, it's boring and it isn't the "gotcha" that you think it is.

Perhaps you forgot the fable which... features a real wolf.

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.

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 :)

Apologies- Reason: explanation, motive, cause, or justification

> 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

???

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.

:) Wow you are getting ahead of yourself aren't you. LLMs are dangerous tools that any moron nowadays has access to. They can fabricate images of wolves roaming the streets, hallucinate fake arguments that sound really convincing and even coach people into committing a suicide, as you probably heard in the recent at least a dozen cases. I can't quite see the comparison you are making. It's not like you have access to a nuclear reactor or whatever other dangerous technology you wanted to lump in with it, at your finger tips, do you? This is because those other dangerous technologies are carefully managed. So now follow where I am taking this, I'll be explain it really simple. Guns are really easily accessible to people in large parts of the US. So some people will use guns to kill other people. Sometimes its an accident, like kids playing with daddy's gun and shooting their sibling. Some people argue that guns should be restricted, as it would reduce such accidents and incidents. But some other people say "guns dont kill people - people kill people". Now LLMs are as a dangerous technology, accessible to most anyone not just in the US, but around the world. Also easier to use. So anyone with basic command of language and ability to clank on a keyboard can "use" it. To the point that some people not only harm others, like this Korean champ, but also themselves, like those people who were goaded into committing suicide. Now my point was, and it should not have been that hard to see, that your argument is precisely of the "guns don't kill people" variety. The point is, if the chatbots that we pompously resigned to call "artificial intelligence" make mistakes 30-40% of the time, and we use them to verify information, they are dangerous and should not be allowed to use for such purposes as misleading generating public. Because that is dangerous. Now, in your small little selfish world, maybe they are "everywhere", meaning, you can offload your thinking to them, and maybe you even use them to write emails and summarise other people emails so you don't completely drown in your boring office job. But it does not mean you should compare them to anything you listed above. Those small "benefits" do not account for overall shittines of this so-called technology.

Since you opted to engage in this off-topic discussion, I'll just point out that the overwhelmingly vast majority of the one billion or so guns currently on the planet have never been used to kill anyone. It's statistically far more accurate to say their primary purpose is to defend, with killing much further down on the list.

> Guns primary purpose is to kill

A shield's purpose is to defend, or a bulletproof vest, or...

Try using a gun for that and it ain't gonna work. You might say that a gun's purpose is to deter? But the only way it can defend is by producing lethal force, so the defense can only be a potential secondary effect.

> 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.

>Willfully diverting limited public service resources, that might potentially be assigned to saving someone's life or health?

This is an accurate criticism of the boy in the fable, if... an unnecessary way to express the idea.

The world can't be that advanced when you have people shoving their religious imaginary friends in every sentence and then feigning victimhood for having it called out.

"The boy who generated wolf"

the 40-year-old unnamed man who generated wolf

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