South Korea police arrest man for posting AI photo of runaway wolf

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gx1n0dl9no

235 147 3 months ago

_fw• 3 months 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.

lukan4• 3 months 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• 3 months 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.

PUSH_AX• 3 months 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.

pj_mukh• 3 months 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.

moron4hire• 3 months ago

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

shlant• 3 months ago

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

colechristensen3• 3 months ago

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

Razengan• 3 months 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

littlestymaar• 3 months ago

Yeah, I really don't see the difference with false bomb alerts.

colechristensen3• 3 months ago

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.

hansmayer4• 3 months 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.

grosswait2• 3 months ago

Is there a reason you felt the need to slip this non sequitur in your reply?

unsupp0rted• 3 months 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

GuB-42• 3 months 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.

baobabKoodaa• 3 months ago

"The boy who generated wolf"

red-iron-pine• 3 months ago

the 40-year-old unnamed man who generated wolf

TwoNineFive2• 3 months ago

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.

prmoustache• 3 months 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• 3 months 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

CrazyStat• 3 months 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

05• 3 months 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?

boodleboodle• 3 months ago

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

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

adithyareddy• 3 months ago

India is trying to increase it's wild tiger population, but that doesn't mean you let tigers roam around in the middle of New Delhi.

christoff122• 3 months ago

I'm a little surprised zoo animals aren't chipped with some kind of beacon locator for incidents such as these.

ErroneousBosh2• 3 months ago

What sort of size do you think that would be?

chrisweekly• 3 months 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.

Luc• 3 months 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.

christoff122• 3 months ago

No idea. Surely some enterprising engineer could come up with a viable solution that could be sold to zoos all over, though.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 3 months ago

Somewhat smaller than a regular airtag.

sigmoid105• 3 months 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.

AussieWog93• 3 months ago

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

darkwater2• 3 months 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

jamesnorden• 3 months ago

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

raincole• 3 months 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."

sebastiennight2• 3 months 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"

maplethorpe5• 3 months 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?

tete• 3 months ago

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

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

ForHackernews• 3 months ago

People have lied to the authorities without AI.

latexr6• 3 months 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

heddycrow3• 3 months ago

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

mminer237• 3 months ago

That would be so vague as to be useless.

conductr• 3 months ago

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.

culi3• 3 months ago

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...

Gigachad• 3 months ago

IMO you should be legally required to disclose that a video has been AI generated when you share it.

jonnonz• 3 months ago

This is how the future will look!

Ylpertnodi• 3 months ago

Nay, poor BBC journalism has been around for a while, now.

kqp• 3 months 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.

tmtvl• 3 months 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.

sigbottle• 3 months ago

That was the impression I got as well, but it seems like other people disagree.

Joker_vD2• 3 months ago

It's always amusing to see what crimes people demand to have strict liability for, yes. "He posted a wrong location online, of course that'd disrupt the search for the wolf, right to jail, right away".

dfxm122• 3 months ago

Authorities also presented the AI image during a press briefing on the runaway wolf, local media reported. ... Authorities did not specify if the man had intentionally sent the photo to authorities during their search or simply shared it online.

With the info presented in the article, it sounds like the cops jumped to conclusions, got publicly embarrassed and are now going after him to either save face or get revenge (depending on how credulous you are of LEO).

thebruce87m• 3 months ago

It seems the police just read a post by a random person on the internet, assumed it’s true

If it was true and police saw it but didn’t act, the fallout for them could be much worse depending on the outcome.

rubslopes• 3 months ago

If this was true, they should have contacted the user nevertheless.

Wowfunhappy• 3 months ago

I can't decide how I feel about this.

The thing is, there's basically no reason to create this photo other than to mislead the authorities. It's purposefully blurry and not aesthetically pleasing. I cannot come up with any plausible artistic intent.

This could have happened without AI. Imagine if the police were trying to catch a serial killer, and I posted on Twitter that I saw him in a small town in Idaho or wherever, not because I had any real information but because I thought it would be amusing to create chaos. Maybe I'd create a bunch of sock puppet accounts with correlated sightings. At no point would I explicitly make a false police report, but the fake posts would get noticed all the same.

Is this illegal? I have no idea, I'm not a lawyer—but it feels like the sort of thing you'd want to have laws against. I'm not sure whether you'd run into first amendment issues in the United States.

TwoNineFive2• 3 months ago

I like this reply. It's nuanced. This guy didn't post that picture to be helpful. He did it to troll, and trolling is cruelty, and defending cruelty is immoral.

stingraycharles• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

I think many places, even without specific deepfake laws, would prosecute someone who used a fake image to mislead the police.

antiloper• 3 months ago

Need this in the west as well

pluc• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

Oh actually penalizing people does help

kreco• 3 months ago

Penalizing people is slow and does not scale as much as AI creations that can be mass produced.

pixl972• 3 months ago

And if the person isn't in your country?

Nasrudith• 3 months 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?

bblb2• 3 months 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.

rwmj• 3 months ago

"easily" is doing some heavy lifting there. Is Photoshopping this image together really easier than prompting an AI?

bblb2• 3 months 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.

RIMR• 3 months ago

Yes, it was easy. Just because AI is "easier" doesn't mean that photoshopping a dog into a picture was ever particularly hard.

dfxm122• 3 months ago

"Easily in the pre-AI era" is different from "easier" & "easier" wasn't the claim.

To answer your question, relative ease is a function, in part, of one's skills & resources, so, it's certainly a reasonable claim to make, but will be different person to person.

pixl972• 3 months ago

And they easily could have been arrested for making photoshops of the same event.

NooneAtAll3• 3 months ago

even better - it could've been an old photo in pre-photoshop era

sammy2255• 3 months ago

What is the charge?

fredoralive• 3 months 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.

heddycrow3• 3 months 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?

idbehold• 3 months ago

The amount of punctuation and terrible sentence structure make this nearly incomprehensible.

heddycrow3• 3 months 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.

rm30• 3 months 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?

culi3• 3 months ago

Posting misinfo online like that during a hunt that has the entire nation's attention is yelling fire in a crowded theater. Speech acts aren't protected when they unhinge on other rights. Like the entire subspecies of wolf surviving. It is extinct in the wild

bhanuhai2• 3 months ago

Solid

thrownaway561• 3 months ago

The dude openly admits that he posted the image "for fun", so there was clearly nefarious behavior and purposely wanted to confuse police and the investigation. I don't see why people are trying to defend this dude as him simply "posting a picture of a wolf". I guess people will defend any sort of bad behavior in this day and age.

valicord• 3 months ago

How do you immediately jump from "fun" to nefarious behavior? Are you implying that it's impossible for anyone to have fun in a non-nefarious way?

shantnutiwari• 3 months ago

He wasn't arrested because he posted an AI photo. He was arrested because he was wasting police time during a genuine problem of the police hunting for a escaped wolf.

He would have been arrested even if the image wasnt AI.

The title and article are very...tabloid-y

sveme• 3 months ago

Why is the Content Credentials Standard [1] not more supported? It's basically hardware-signing of images, which would make it fairly straightforward to identify AI-generated content.

Needs to be supported by smartphones, of course.

[1] https://contentcredentials.org/

hbarka• 3 months ago

The BBC could have done a better job here with the headline. How about, “South Korea police arrest man who pulled a prank costing extensive resources”. The device of the prank is irrelevant really it’s the consequence. Involuntary manslaughter works the same way.

Joker_vD2• 3 months ago

Last time I checked, "costing extensive resources" was not a crime. And even if it were, you'd still ideally need mens rea.

estebank• 3 months ago

When was the last time you checked South Korean law?

oldbear• 3 months ago

the news paywall. wow ok.

South Korea police arrest man for posting AI photo of runaway wolf

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