The spread of fake photos of Trump’s arrest.. The Washington Post: The destructive power of artificial intelligence is emerging

Written by Reem Abdel Hamid

Friday, March 24, 2023 11:05 AM

The Washington Post warned of the destructive power of artificial intelligence, which was represented in the emergence of fake photos of the arrest of former US President Donald Trump by the police forces, in light of speculation that charge him in New York.

The newspaper said that Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative platform Bellingcat, was reading about the expected impeachment of Trump, when he decided to turn the matter into a visual. And he turned into an artificial intelligence artist, and presented him with some perceptions represented in the fall of Donald Trump during his arrest, and shared the results on Twitter, which were pictures of the former president surrounded by officers whose badges are vague and unclear. He wrote that making pictures of Trump is being arrested pending arrest. Higgins said in an interview that if he was joking about this, he imagined maybe only five people would retweet the tweet.

But just two days later, his posts depicting an event that had not yet happened had been viewed nearly 5 million times, providing a case study of the increasing complexity of the AI-generated image, its ease of dissemination and its ability to cause confusion in volatile news environments.

Also, this development, according to what the newspaper says, illustrates the absence of corporate standards or government regulations dealing with the use of artificial intelligence in creating and spreading lies.

Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said policymakers have been warning for years about the potential misuse of advertising in spreading disinformation and sowing discord in general. And while it took a few years for the capabilities of AI to develop, we are now at a point where these tools are widely available and have incredibly capabilities.