Someone I know is a high school English teacher (being vague because I don’t want to cause them trouble or embarrassment). They told me they were asking ChatGPT to tell them whether their students’ creative writing assignments were AI-generated or not-I pointed out that LLMs such as ChatGPT have poor reliability at this; classifier models trained specifically for this task perform somewhat better, yet also have their limitations. In any event, if the student has access to whatever model the teacher is using to test for AI-generation (or even comparable models), they can always respond adversarially by tinkering with an AI-generated story until it is no longer classified as AI-generated

Under the other photos it says A photo taken by a BBC North West Tonight reporter showed the bridge is undamaged and A BBC North West reporter visited the bridge today and confirmed it was undamaged

They may have first ran the photo through an AI, but they also went out to verify. Or ran it after verification to understand it better, maybe

ChatGPT: This looks like AI. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a bit of training data in my time.

This is the fast way they can try, but it shouldn't be the most trustworthy way and shouldn't be in report.

If it's nano banana you can give it to Gemini bc it has artifacts

Yeah, talk about begging the question. Yikes.

Yeah that hardly talks of the "journalist" being good at their job. At worst they asked a biased question like "has this photo been AI generated and if then how" or worse.

People tend to think that AI is like a specific kind of human which knows other AI things better. But we should expect better from people that do writing as their job.

It's not, but when you have 30 minutes to ship a story...

So far, I see the most concern about this sort of thing from people who came of age around or after Web 2.0 hit, at a time when even a good photoshop wasn’t too hard to place as fake.

Those I know who lived through this issue when digital editing really became cheap seem to be more sanguine about it, while the younger generation on the opposite side side is some combination “whatever” or frustrated but accept that yet another of countless weird things has invade a reality that was never quite right to begin with.

The folks in between, I’d say about the 20 years from age 20 to 40, are the most annoyed though. The eye of the storm on the way to proving that cyberpunk lacked the required imagination to properly calibrate our sense of when things were going to really get insane.

There will be people who care about trusted and reliably accurate news sources, and at least some of them are willing to pay for it. Think 404 Media.

But there are people who don't want their news to be "reliably accurate", but who watch/read news to have their own opinions and prejudices validated no matter how misinformed they are. Think Fox News.

But there are way way more people who only consume "news" on algorithmically tweaked social media platforms, where driving "engagement" is the only metric that matters, and "truth" or "accuracy" is not just lower priorities but are completely irrelevant to the platform owners and hence their algorithms. Fake ragebait drives engagement which drives advertising profits.

You don't need AI for this kind of disruption. People have been making fake bomb threats for years. You just have to say it, either directly to the railway/etc. or publicly enough that somebody else will believe it and forward it to them. The difference might be of intent - if you say you planted a bomb on the bridge, you're probably committing a crime, but if you just post a piece of art without context, it's more plausibly deniable.

It's also pretty common in the UK for trains to be delayed just because some passenger accidentally left their bag on the platform. Not even any malicious intent. I was on a train that stopped in a tunnel for that reason once. They're just very vulnerable to any hint of danger.

Sir, this is AI prose. Wendy's doesn't allow AI prose.

Again, I see this argument.

“Bad X has happened before and unsolved. Why worry about bad X^2?”

Personally I’d prefer if it remained at X so solutions can catch up. But that’s just me.

That leaves much more of a paper trail. People routinely are fined and jailed for pulling off such "pranks", partially because "fake threats"/"abuse of emergency response resources" are an exception to many freedom-of-speech laws.

A fake photo of a collapsed bridge however won't cross that criminal threshold.

You also don't need gunpowder to kill someone with projectiles, but gunpowder changed things in important ways. All I ever see are the most specious knee-jerk defenses of AI that immediately fall apart.

I really liked the first half to 3/4ths of the that book. The last part was less interesting to me but the Moab plot line and all the parts around anonymity/online presence I enjoyed.

Anyone to whom that information is relevant already knew that this vulnerability has existed for a long time.

Just realize that people and institutions are adaptable and their processes are not set in stone. We'll find a way through even if you or I can't imagine exactly how right now.

When the west devolves into a low trust society because of things like this and the relentless importing of people from such, it will lose the advantage of being a high trust society. Equality for all!

They should already be able to detect line breaks using old technology. They send current pulses down the line to detect stuck switches, since stuck switches can cause collisions. Also, the pulses are conducted through the wheels and axles of any trains, so they can use resistance and/or timing to figure out where the trains are.

Having said that, if it was 2020 and you told me that making photorealistic pictures of broken bridges was harder than spoofing the signals I just described, I’d say you were crazy.

The idea that a kid could do this would have seen even less plausible (that’s not to say a kid did it, just that they could have).

Anyway, since recently-intractable things are now trivial, runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.

90% manned. A lot of money and time goes into getting track access.

And collecting unmanned data is still such a pain. At the moment, you stick calibration gear to a train and hope it gets as much noise free data as it can. All whilst going at least 40mph over the area you want - you’re fighting vibrations, vehicle grease, too much sunlight, not enough sunlight, rain, ballast covering things, equipment not calibrated before going out etc etc.

Regardless of how many people it disrupted or not, it’s not a non story.

It’s highlighted a weakness. It’s easy to disrupt national infrastructure by generating realistic hoax photos/videos with very little effort from anywhere in the world.

UK is really good at self-sabotaging and giving itself away to corporate interests (wealth is gonna trickle down any minute now, I'm sure of it!), Russians can happily just grab popcorn and enjoy the comedy show, no active participation necessary.

> Yet another attack vector

AI-Generated disinfo has been a known attack vector for the Russian regime (and their allied regimes) for years now [0][1].

[0] - https://cyberscoop.com/russia-ukraine-china-iran-information...

[1] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/esp...

Am I bovvered?