In online publications that were collectively, hundreds of thousands of times, some social media users have affirmed that a photo of a Mark Carney campaign event was generated by AI.
Several Social networks users affirm that the image, which shows an event held last week at the Pinnacle Hotel at the dock in North Vancouver, was manipulated to create the impression that Carney was talking in front of a larger crowd. Some users were also based on online AI detector tools that suggested that the photo was created using artificial intelligence.
This is not the only statement that politicians have manipulated images, conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has been subject to similar false statements in the past, and experts say that the growing sophistication of AI is causing people to be increasingly Skeptics of images and videos online.
The CBC visual research team obtained the original image of the Carney event and found no evidence that the shots were generated by AI or digitally altered beyond the traditional lighting and color correction techniques. A CBC News Cameraperson was also present at the event. Accessing CBC RAW images, which shows the entire rally, allows a visual comparison with the photo of the campaign.
Carney’s campaign says the image was not created with AI.
“It is an authentic image of the North Vancouver event of Mr. Carney, and we can confirm its precision,” the campaign said in a statement.
The Carney campaign provided CBC News with the original photo, which contains metadata: information behind the scene that details everything, from the type of camera used until the exact moment the image was taken. In the images of the CBC event, the photographer is visible in the background at the precise moment and at an angle that fits the image.
The controversy illustrates how recent advances in generative AI are causing people to breach more and more to doubt anything they see online, said Darren Linvill, co -director of the Forensic Media Center at the University of Clemson in South Carolina .
“I think that one of the greatest dangers here is not necessarily that the world is full of false things,” he said, “but the simple fact that we will not believe real things when they are right in front of us.”
Carney’s image is only the last instance of statements that politicians have manipulated images. At the end of last year, several users said, in publications they saw tens of thousands of times, that Pierre Poilievre had put Photoshop in an image at the Toronto Chinatown festival.
But the images broadcast live show the exact moment in which the photo was taken, and the perspective coincides with the view in the location of the festival stage in Toronto.
CBC News captured images of Mark Carney speaking at a campaign event at North Vancouver on February 12. Some users of social networks then said that the photos of the event shared by the Carney campaign were generated by AI. When comparing the photos of the campaign with the images of the CBC event, CBC News has confirmed that the photos were not manipulated by AI.
Strange hands, theme of perspective
Users of social networks also made several statements that parts of the Pnessy campaign image showed that it was generated by AI.
For example, a user argued that the placement of a person’s hand on his phone and that the face of the attendees had a “collage” nature that indicated that they were generated by the.
But the comparison of the photo with the CBC RAW images showed that each of these people is real and attended the event.
A user said that a man seen behind Carney in the original photo had “no feet” and held a flag at a strange angle. But the man, who uses a white and beige pictures with a distinctive strap on his shoulder, can be glimpsed in CBC images at different points during speech.
The observers also disagree with a woman taking a photo in the foreground of the image, arguing that the image on her screen did not match the scene that surrounded her. But the image approach shows that the back of people’s heads in front of it are visible on its screen, as well as the lamps of the room, Carney and some of the crowd behind it.
The mismatch is probably due to contradictory angles. The campaign photographer who took the original photo is up and behind the woman in question, in an elevator, sample of CBC images.
Issue of reliability of the AI detector
Several social network users were based on online sites that intend to identify, or at least provide an idea, about whether an image is generated by AI or not.
These sites can provide precise answers, said Linvill, but they are not infallible. He pointed out that the sites will often provide a measure of probability about the veracity of an image, instead of a yes or no.
“In general, they are quite reliable. They are not perfect. They are certainly not 100 percent,” he said. “You are asking a computer to do something you can’t do yourself, of course, that will be difficult.”
CBC News executed the image of the Carney campaign through several free online AI detectors. Five correctly identified the photo as real, or with a high probability of being real. Three said the image was probably generated by AI, and one was not conclusive.
Linville said that training in order to detect false images is something that will have to evolve along with the rapid advances in AI technology.
“Some of the things that perhaps we could have trusted the past, we cannot always trust now,” he said.
Ia image generators have traditionally fought to properly represent hands, mouths and human teeth, he says. While they are not yet perfect, he points out that the programs are improving now.
Linville says that the controversy about a photo such as the Carney event can arise from technical problems, such as a wide and full of people who do not expect to take their photos, but also of broader trends in how we deal with AI and our trust in the information more widely.
“Sometimes people are partial,” he said. “Like computers are not perfect, we are not perfect.”
