Fake AI Photos Are Coming to a Social Network Near You
Twitter, TikTok and Facebook will struggle to keep up with a deluge of AI-generated images that have already started duping people.
These AI-generated photos are spearheading a new misinformation crisis.
Illustration: Christine Vanden Byllaardt
On Tuesday in Paris, a popular Twitter user posted three images of French President Emmanuel Macron sprinting between riot police and protesters, surrounded by billows of smoke. The images, viewed more than 3 million times, were fake. But for anyone not following the growth of AI-powered image generators, that wasn’t so obvious. True to the user’s handle, “No Context French” added no label or caption. And as it turned out, some people believed they were legit. A colleague tells me that at least two friends in London who worked in various professional jobs stumbled across the pictures and thought they were real photos from this week’s sometimes-violent pension reform strikes. One of them shared the image in a group chat before being told it was fake.