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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

Title should be "Man arrested for deceptive and antisocial behavior".

The only reason you are seeing this right now is because it has AI in the title.

Isn't the technology that enabled the deception noteworthy? Presumably this person wouldn't have been able to do this before AI.

Hypothetically, if a hacking tool was released that let non-technical people hack into sensitive databases, and then a journalist wrote the headline "local man hacks IRS", without any mention of the tool, wouldn't that be a bit irresponsible, to purposely leave that information out?

> Presumably this person wouldn't have been able to do this before AI.

Photoshop? I don't think you need much skill.

To make a shooped image good enough to fool the police into think they're looking at a completely real picture, you'd think it would take a reasonable amount of skill. If nothing else you need an exact match picture in terms of lighting and perspective.

I guess people here are too young to remember things like the WTC plane guy. Half the people online thought it was genuine, while he did it for the lulz in a few minutes. Nobody cared about inconsistent lighting and perspective. Same way most people don't care about the obvious hallmarks of diffusion model generated pictures today.

I'm not too young. I can't remember if I thought it was real at the time, but if I did, I give myself a pass since I was probably viewing it on a 15 inch CRT at 1024x768.

Because we're talking about the ease of Photoshopping a wolf into a scene, I think it's also worth pointing out that floating objects are a lot easier to work with than grounded objects, since cast shadows and bounce lighting are less of an issue. Having said that, it would still require some basic skill to achieve the WTC image which I think you're discounting. You'd need a working knowledge of layers, masks, and the lasso tool, which already would have placed it out of reach for most people at the time. Online resources were much more scarce, so I wouldn't be surprised if this guy was a hobbyist photographer or graphic designer. It definitely wouldn't have been achievable in a few minutes for the average person, and doing the same thing with a wolf would have been far more difficult, and well outside the realm of possibility for anyone who wasn't an expert.

The picture in the article also doesn't look very high res. So it's actually the exact same circumstances as WTC guy, except the police actually cared enough to act on the picture but not enough to verify it. You could take all these arguments here and apply them 1:1 to photoshop in the late 90s / early 2000s. Back then it was also easier than ever before to manipulate images and non-experts could suddenly do what only professional forgers could before. AI has merely slightly lowered the bar further to the point that even people who have trouble turning on a PC can do it now.

> AI has merely slightly lowered the bar

I guess we're not going to agree on just how far that bar has fallen. Learning Photoshop as a teen got me my first job. The only reason I had one at all was because most people couldn't do a very convincing job of it. Now even my mom, a person who struggles to open her email, can do a better photoshop than me.

And your grandkids will be better at certain things than you too. That's just what progress in tech is. Without it, we'd still be riding horses and writing letters with ink. Sure that accelerated fraud and misuse too, but let's not pretend anyone would want to give up the all the benefits these things brought to save a few gullible people who would probably still be scammed eventually.

> That's just what progress in tech is. Without it, we'd still be riding horses and writing letters with ink. Sure that accelerated fraud and misuse too

The original argument was about whether these tools had accelerated fraud and misuse, or whether not much had changed because people could just do the same thing with photoshop before. You and others were playing down the impact of AI. It sounds like we now both agree they have accelerated fraud and misuse.

> And your grandkids will be better at certain things than you too. That's just what progress in tech is.

You're misunderstanding my argument. I was pointing out that a large shift has happened that has enabled deception where it was not possible before, not lamenting the loss of a job that I don't do anymore. I have nothing against the progress of technology. But I do think we should think carefully about how we implement it.

>It sounds like we now both agree they have accelerated fraud and misuse.

This was never in question and I don't see where you picked it up in this comment chain.

> I was pointing out that a large shift has happened that has enabled deception where it was not possible before

And I was pointing out these exact shifts have happened throughout your life without you noticing or caring and they will keep happening in the future. The only difference here is you noticed it this time, because the keyword in question prints free advertising money. But arguing why or how this one thing might be bad while there are tons of actually bad things out there misses reality by a wide margin. It's like arguing against renewables because coal workers will be disadvantaged. Sure, that's 100% true. No need to argue. But is it really what society should care about in light of everything else we know today?

Creating a photorealistic mashup in Photoshop, without AI, takes a lot of skill. Just getting the shadows looking correct takes enough skill in itself, and that's only part of it.

Have you used Photoshop before? You come across as commenting on something you don't understand.

A person who had a Photoshop licence, had played around with layers and colour balance before and was sufficiently motivated to make it look convincing to spend a bit of time tidying it up, sure they could. But I'm not sure that necessarily applies to random people making funny memes of the wolf in their neighbourhood...

People have lied to the authorities without AI.

The technology used is very much relevant, because the ease of access and easiness of production are likely to have been the biggest contributors. Had they had to open an image editor and spend a few hours to make something convincing, they would’ve been much less likely to do so, assuming this particular person even had the skills, and would have had multiple opportunities to change their mind.

It’s a crime of opportunity¹, one where you have the idea and act on it on a whim. No opportunity, no crime, and the technology provided the opportunity.

So yes, the technology used matters.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_opportunity

Yes, it's an interesting and novel thing about a topic many people here are interested in.

The one time the headline isn't misleading, you want it changed?

It’s relevant in the sense that I would have never guessed this little prank would get someone arrested.

We need to learn/adapt what we post, see, believe in photos to avoid arrest. Especially so in the AI reality because generating these images, and these pranks, has become increasingly easy for anyone to do with no skills and minimal time.

I think the part I find most fascinating though is it’s not clear if he took this picture to the police, actively wasting their time, or if he just posted it and they found it and mistakenly took it as truth. I have no insight to SK laws but for me it’s going to be unfair if they were the ones that used this picture as evidence when if it was never meant to be taken seriously.

That's like saying "guns don't kill people, people do". We know that's bologna and you can't just ignore Weapon Instrumentality

http://web.archive.org/web/20250201051019/https://www.ojp.go...

That would be so vague as to be useless.

I so wish this were true. Put AI in the title, garner instant attention.

Except the actual title here is clearer. Your suggestion is so anti-AI-clickbait that it overflew and became a bad title again.

If Tesla (insert any car manufacturer you hate) ran over a kid I'd like to see the title say it, instead of "Tesla fined for violating traffic laws."

I'd say "Tesla" in your example would be the equivalent attention-grabber to "AI" in the article here, so your non-clickbait example might have been "car manufacturer fined for car accident"

Yes, and at the same time we should ask the question: would the intersection between "people who think this is a funny thing to do" and "people with the technical capabilities to actually generate something that misleads police" [1] return a value > 0 before GenAI?

[1] waiting for some example where fool policemen where outsmarted with simple tricks /s

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