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#wolf#don#image#arrested#person#police#used#guns#kill#more

Discussion (99 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

_fwabout 4 hours 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.

lukanabout 4 hours 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"

sillysaurusxabout 4 hours 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.

croesabout 4 hours ago
Crying wolf is normally starting the operation while there isn‘t a wolf.

This is misdirection while there is a wolf

Similar but different

psychoslaveabout 4 hours ago
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.

shlantabout 1 hour ago
what an incredibly dumb thread this is. OP pointed out something amusing and it's being ruined by completely useless pedantry
fennecbutt39 minutes ago
Welcome to HN, I guess
pj_mukhabout 3 hours 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_AXabout 3 hours 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.

lukanabout 2 hours ago
Intent or not, it did disturb as it misslead. And .. how can one imagine not disturb a search, when posting a wrong location?
moron4hireabout 3 hours ago
There was a real wolf in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", too.
hansmayerabout 3 hours 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.
GuB-42about 1 hour ago
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.

hansmayerabout 1 hour ago
:) 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.
unsupp0rtedabout 3 hours ago
> 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

hansmayerabout 2 hours ago
???
grosswaitabout 3 hours ago
Is there a reason you felt the need to slip this non sequitur in your reply?
hansmayerabout 2 hours ago
I am not sure, but it probably isn't because I wanted to sound smart by using smart sounding words :)
Razenganabout 3 hours 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

littlestymaarabout 3 hours ago
Yeah, I really don't see the difference with false bomb alerts.
kqpabout 3 hours 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.
tmtvlabout 2 hours ago
Yeah, we can't actually tell whether the image was posted with the poster going 'hey, @SouthKoreanPolice, wolf is here!', or whether it was xit out without any comment or context, or whether it was in response to a friend who lives in the vicinity of the location in the picture wondering where the wolf was,...

I don't care enough to bother finding out, but seems like the BBC could have done some more journalism, if they were so inclined.

sigbottleabout 1 hour ago
That was the impression I got as well, but it seems like other people disagree.
sigmoid10about 4 hours 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.

maplethorpeabout 3 hours 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?

teteabout 3 hours ago
> Presumably this person wouldn't have been able to do this before AI.

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

conartist6about 2 hours ago
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.
notahackerabout 1 hour ago
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...
maplethorpeabout 2 hours ago
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.

ForHackernewsabout 1 hour ago
People have lied to the authorities without AI.
latexrabout 3 hours ago
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

jamesnordenabout 3 hours ago
The one time the headline isn't misleading, you want it changed?
AussieWog93about 4 hours ago
Yes, it's an interesting and novel thing about a topic many people here are interested in.
mminer237about 2 hours ago
That would be so vague as to be useless.
heddycrowabout 2 hours ago
I so wish this were true. Put AI in the title, garner instant attention.
raincoleabout 3 hours 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."

sebastiennight9 minutes ago
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"
darkwaterabout 3 hours 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

bblbabout 3 hours ago
How about not believing everything that's posted to the Internet. This could've easily been done with Photoshop in the pre AI era.
rwmjabout 3 hours ago
"easily" is doing some heavy lifting there. Is Photoshopping this image together really easier than prompting an AI?
RIMR6 minutes ago
Yes, it was easy. Just because AI is "easier" doesn't mean that photoshopping a dog into a picture was ever particularly hard.
bblbabout 3 hours ago
Background image of some local street. Image of a wolf and object selection tool (pre AI era version). Touch up a little and add some filters to drop the quality.

Sure a little bit more involved than the two second AI prompt, but 3 min job for the lulz photoshoppers.

latexrabout 2 hours ago
No, it’s not “a little bit more involved”, it’s significantly more involved because it also requires the skills to even know what you’re talking about, the experience of having done it before to be convincing, the inclination to spend the time on it, downloading Photoshop itself, possibly cracking it… There are a lot of steps, most of which most people haven’t done and don’t know how. With generative AI, you just open a website and type a few words.

There are significantly more people able to type a few words into a prompt than people who can use an image editor fast and convincingly and would be inclined to waste their time on this kind of fake.

darkwaterabout 1 hour ago
I could never do it without investing a large amount of time into PS, and getting stressed a lot in the meanwhile.
NooneAtAll321 minutes ago
even better - it could've been an old photo in pre-photoshop era
pixl97about 2 hours ago
And they easily could have been arrested for making photoshops of the same event.
rm30about 2 hours ago
The BBC article doesn't specify the text with the image, but I clearly see a procedural gap in the police department. Accusing a man who only posted a photo, reorganizing the search based on an unverified photo, it's a big failure.

Did Orwell teach anything? What will they do with the next Visitors' spaceship photo?

plucabout 3 hours 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.
gmercabout 3 hours ago
Oh actually penalizing people does help
krecoabout 3 hours ago
Penalizing people is slow and does not scale as much as AI creations that can be mass produced.
pixl97about 2 hours ago
And if the person isn't in your country?
Nasrudithabout 1 hour ago
Safeguards are a myth we like to tell ourselves exists so we don't have to reckon with the effects of human agency with tools. Where are the safeguards on knives and guns that make them only usable to hurt bad people?
prmoustacheabout 4 hours 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?

spiffykabout 4 hours 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 them off before they reproduce, hence why they are almost-extinct.

The zoo provides a controlled environment needed to restore the species.

EDIT: typo/word ordering

CrazyStatabout 1 hour ago
Also, careful breeding to retain as much genetic diversity as possible is important to avoid collapse in small populations. Even if small local pockets survive, if each pocket is only able to inbreed with itself that will cause problems.

Our local children's museum is part of a network of sites working to restore red wolf [1] populations. Every few years they get new wolves as the coordinators move young wolves around to optimize mating pairs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_wolf

boodleboodleabout 3 hours ago
They live in a pretty big conservatory (korean link but you can see the pictures)

https://m.wikitree.co.kr/articles/1132213

05about 4 hours 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?
christoff12about 4 hours ago
I'm a little surprised zoo animals aren't chipped with some kind of beacon locator for incidents such as these.
ErroneousBoshabout 4 hours ago
What sort of size do you think that would be?
Lucabout 3 hours ago
Small and low energy enough that tiny migratory birds can wear them for months. Externally worn of course (e.g. attached to the ear, for a wolf).

You could adjust the firmware of a wildlife tag to start transmitting location every 10 minutes when the animal leaves a geo-fence.

ErroneousBoshabout 2 hours ago
Bird ones are easy because birds are high in the air, so there's nothing to block the signal.

They are also not implanted in the birds, but are a relatively large "backpack" or leg tag.

chrisweeklyabout 3 hours 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.
codebjeabout 3 hours ago
Those chips need to be scanned from about 3cm away. If you want a locator tag, it needs to carry enough power to broadcast a signal a useful distance. Still, a microchip is handy if you're not sure if it's your tiger you found.
jannesabout 3 hours ago
Those chips cannot track a dog's location
stingraycharlesabout 3 hours 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.
mshabout 3 hours ago
I think many places, even without specific deepfake laws, would prosecute someone who used a fake image to mislead the police.
bhanuhai236 minutes ago
Solid
antiloperabout 3 hours ago
Need this in the west as well
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jonnonzabout 3 hours ago
This is how the future will look!
Ylpertnodiabout 1 hour ago
Nay, poor BBC journalism has been around for a while, now.
Gigachadabout 4 hours ago
IMO you should be legally required to disclose that a video has been AI generated when you share it.
sammy2255about 3 hours ago
What is the charge?
fredoraliveabout 2 hours ago
The article says:

“Authorities are investigating him for disrupting government work by deception, an offence that carries up to five years in prison or a maximum fine of 10 million Korean won ($6,700; £5,000)”

Somewhat harsher than the UK at least, where “wasting police time” would only get you six months or around a £2500 fine.

heddycrowabout 3 hours ago
It is, quite frankly, completely wrong that this man was arrested—if anything, by this line of reasoning, it should have been an artist instead—since AI, as we are told, merely makes copies of what hard-working human artists have already created and shared on the internet.

AI is plagiarism—full stop—nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, this point could have been made without sarcasm (and AI tells for parody)—I’m aware—but that would remove a certain… texture from the argument. And where, exactly, is the fun in that?

idbeholdabout 2 hours ago
The amount of punctuation and terrible sentence structure make this nearly incomprehensible.
heddycrowabout 2 hours ago
Yeh, I might have went overboard with the snark here. It seems even the line hinting that this was snarky was lost.

If it helps, imagine the text more as a work of art than an instruction manual. Art matters.