S. Korea police arrest man over AI image of runaway wolf that misled authorities (bbc.com)
85 points by giuliomagnifico 2 hours ago
_fw an hour ago
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.
hansmayer 2 minutes ago
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.
lukan an hour ago
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"
sillysaurusx an hour ago
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.
psychoslave 42 minutes ago
croes an hour ago
pj_mukh 4 minutes ago
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.
PUSH_AX 6 minutes ago
> 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.
Razengan 17 minutes ago
> 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
kqp 34 minutes ago
It sounds like he didn’t actually file a false police report. They don’t even say they asked him whether it’s true. It seems the police just read a post by a random person on the internet, assumed it’s true, then arrested him when it wasn’t. The article is devastatingly light on info, though, so I can’t be sure.
sigmoid10 an hour ago
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.
maplethorpe 12 minutes ago
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?
AussieWog93 42 minutes ago
Yes, it's an interesting and novel thing about a topic many people here are interested in.
jamesnorden 21 minutes ago
The one time the headline isn't misleading, you want it changed?
raincole 18 minutes ago
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."
darkwater 33 minutes ago
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
pluc 12 minutes ago
Get used to it, it's gonna keep happening since we're dumb enough to create a technology that mirrors reality with no safeguards whatsoever.
gmerc 8 minutes ago
Oh actually penalizing people does help
prmoustache an hour ago
> Neukgu is part of a programme at O-World to restore the Korean wolf, which once roamed the Korean Peninsula but is now considered extinct in the wild.
I don't understand, shouldn't they have let him go if the idea is that they still roam in the wild? Why forcing it back to a zoo?
spiffyk an hour ago
Pretty sure if you let only a handful of individuals from an almost-extinct species roam around freely in an uncontrolled environment, chances are pretty high something is going to kill off them before they reproduce, hence why they are almost-extinct.
The zoo provides a controlled environment needed to restore the species.
05 an hour ago
Maybe it’s because wolves are genetically dogs and will cross breed and the conservation program supposedly needs to increase the numbers of that particular breed and not just wolves/dogs in general?
christoff12 an hour ago
I'm a little surprised zoo animals aren't chipped with some kind of beacon locator for incidents such as these.
ErroneousBosh an hour ago
What sort of size do you think that would be?
chrisweekly 29 minutes ago
size of chip? they're tiny. dog owners typically have the vet "chip" their pet as a puppy. full-grown dog doesn't need a bigger chip.
codebje 25 minutes ago
jannes 27 minutes ago
stingraycharles 27 minutes ago
South Korea has some very specific (and unusually harsh) laws around deepfakes. I was under the impression that it was only about impersonating people, but apparently it’s broader.
msh 24 minutes ago
I think many places, even without specific deepfake laws, would prosecute someone who used a fake image to mislead the police.
antiloper 15 minutes ago
Need this in the west as well
jonnonz 35 minutes ago
This is how the future will look!
Gigachad 41 minutes ago
IMO you should be legally required to disclose that a video has been AI generated when you share it.