The image is likely AI generated in this case, but this does not seem like the best strategy for finding out if an image is AI generated.
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
Maybe.
Imo, I think the advances in AI and the hype toward generated everything will actually be the current societies digitally-obsessed course-correction back to having a greater emphases on things like theater, live music, conversing with people in-person or even strangers (the horror, I know) simply to connect/consume more meaningfully. It'll level out integrating both instead of being so digitally loop-sided as humans adapt to enjoy both.*
To me, this shows a need for more local journalism that has been decimated by the digital world. By journalism, I mean it in a more traditional sense, not bloggers and podcast (no shade some follow principled, journalistic integrity -- as some national "traditional" one don't). Local journalism is usually held to account by the community, and even though the worldwide BBC site has this story, it was the local reporters they had that were able to verify. If these AI stories/events accelerate a return to local reporting with a worldwide audience, then all the better.
* I try to be a realist, but when I err, it tends to be on the optimist side
Not the hoaxer!
You can also just call the railroad and report the bridge as damaged.
Hoaxes and pranks and fake threats have been around forever.
A fake photo of a collapsed bridge however won't cross that criminal threshold.
> "The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer," a spokesperson said.
I don't think this will work the way they think it will work. In fact, I think they just proved they're vulnerable to a type of attack that causes disruption and completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer
So far we have almost no positive applications for the IP laundering machines.
From the article:
Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.
Railway expert Tony Miles said due to the timing of the incident, very few passengers will have been impacted by the hoax as the services passing through at that time were primarily freight and sleeper trains.
"They generally go slow so as not to disturb the passengers trying to sleep - this means they have a bit of leeway to go faster and make up time if they encounter a delay," he said.
"It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."
A fake image of a stone bridge with fallen parapets prompts the same response as a phone call about a fallen stone from a bridge or (ideally !!) just the earthquake itself - send out a hi-railer for a track inspection.
The larger story here (be it the UK, the US, or AU) is track inspections .. manned or unmanned?
Currently on HN: Railroads will be allowed to reduce inspections and rely more on technology (US) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177550
https://apnews.com/article/automated-railroad-track-inspecti...
on the decision to veer toward unmanned inspections that rely upon lidar, gauge measures, crack vibration sensing etc.
Personally I veer toward manned patrols with state of the art instrumentation - for the rail I'm familiar with there are things that can happen with ballast that are best picked up by a human, for now.
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.
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.
The point of that technology needs to be to alert you when something is wrong not to assure you that everything is fine whenever some other telemetry indicates otherwise.
Yes. That doesn't do much to detect a stone from a parapet rolling onto the line though.
Hence the need for inspection.
> runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.
I'd argue not - whether it's an image of a damaged bridge, a phone call from a concerned person about an obstruction on the line, or just heavy rains or an earthquake .. the line should be inspected.
If anything urban rail is in a better position today as ideally camera networks should hopefully rapidly resolve whether a bridge is really damaged as per a fake image or not.
Ideally? Sure.
But when someone can generate plausible disaster photos of every inch of every line of a country's rail network in mere minutes? And as soon as your inspection finishes, they do it again?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_sabotage_operations_in...
See e.g. https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7785/artykul/2508878,russian... (2020)
> Almost 700 schools throughout Poland were in May last year targeted by hoax bomb threats during key exams, private Polish radio broadcaster RMF FM reported.
> It cited Polish investigators it did not name as saying that a detailed analysis of internet connections and a thorough examination of the content of emails with false bomb threats turned up ties to servers in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.
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...