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    Image of masked men carrying axes is not a real photo of an incident at a Birmingham hospital - Full Fact
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    Image of masked men carrying axes is not a real photo of an incident at a Birmingham hospital – Full Fact

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    1. 99thLuftballon on

      Interesting contemporary news story dated yesterday – apparently people on social media have been widely circulating an image of an armed gang attacking a Birmingham hospital. The image contains a hidden watermark identifying it as AI-generated. The Birmingham police have confirmed that there was no incident at the hospital.

    2. socratic-meth on

      > It was shared on X with the caption: “Meanwhile in Birmingham, UK Following the stabbing of a 16 year old boy a gang of axe wielding thugs ravaged an A&E Department at the local hospital.” X owner Elon Musk shared a post that included the photo and asked “What happened here?”, though the post he shared has since been deleted.

      Of course this tosser shared it.

    4. alwaysright0 on

      I’ve noticed a huge increase in stories about asylum seekers in the past couple of weeks.

      Clearly designed to stir up trouble

    5. NeverGonnaGiveMewUp on

      The word ‘reportedly’ needs to be banned from media articles. Either show the actual source or don’t report it at all. Without it, ‘reportedly’ anything can happen.

    6. YouWhatApe on

      Why have we not banned twitter yet? At this point it serves no other purpose than to undermine the democratic procedures and social order of every European country.

    8. LOTDT on

      I’m going to guess before I read the article that they were supposedly immigrants or asylum seekers.

      Edit: Yep of course it was supposed to make migrants look bad.

    9. freeeeels on

      > A Google spokesperson told Full Fact that a SynthID—a digital watermark embedded into content made with Google AI products that is not visible to the human eye—was detected on the image, and that this means “the image has been generated or modified with AI”. 

      In addition to this, we can use a sophisticated detection technology called “eyes” to, for example, determine that one of the men has six fingers (and a thumb instead of a pinkie finger) and another’s mask is somehow behind his mouth.

    11. VibraniumSpork on

      The problem with all of this stuff is the old “A lie goes around the world before the truth has its trousers on” maxim.

      IMO, we need a freedom of speech-adjacent ‘fact checking’ law levelled at the social media companies with the kind of financial punishments attached that will actually force Meta or X to take the spread of disinformation seriously. Maybe the amount of the fines could be linked to the reach of the message.

      These companies love to boast of their AI credentials; fair enough, leverage it against testing the veracity of posted videos, photos and comments then, and remove them if they’re found to be based on lies. If Elon and Zuck don’t want to comply? Remove them from the marketplace and let more scrupulous competition take their place.