[r721]

I didn't read the story but the outlet is quite well known ("Lyudi Baikala"/"People of Baikal"), they mentioned the illustration is AI-generated in the end of the article. As I see it the confusion started from Twitter user ChrisO_wiki which retells independent Russian media stories in the form of Twitter threads, and he used the image without mentioning that it was AI-generated.

[orbital-decay]

> they mentioned the illustration is AI-generated in the end of the article

This is a really dark pattern, which is clearly being used for deception and plausible deniability (the article is reposted with the embedded picture - everyone sees the picture and assumes it's a photo without checking - it's not us, we warned you it's generated, with a tiny line decoupled from the picture nobody ever paid attention to).

Such use of generated images is extremely myopic and will backfire, or already backfired, sowing doubt in everything they and their side writes, regardless of their credibility. The case will be heavily abused by the opposite propaganda as well.

[r721]

>The case will be heavily abused by the opposite propaganda as well.

This is what already happened actually, the outlet is quite small, I just looked at their thread in Russian, and it received 7 likes:

https://twitter.com/BaikalPeople/status/1653348890807074818

People with agenda started to quote tweet ChrisO_wiki's English translation thread with captions like "look at this blatant pro-Ukrainian propaganda", and it got 1.5M views.

[Imnimo]

Hmm, if that's all this is, I'm not sure I would count this as "AI Generated Propaganda". It's not really someone using AI tools to try to fool people, it's just a case of poor communication.