[kqp]

It sounds like he didn’t actually file a false police report. They don’t even say they asked him whether it’s true. It seems the police just read a post by a random person on the internet, assumed it’s true, then arrested him when it wasn’t. The article is devastatingly light on info, though, so I can’t be sure.

[tmtvl]

Yeah, we can't actually tell whether the image was posted with the poster going 'hey, @SouthKoreanPolice, wolf is here!', or whether it was xit out without any comment or context, or whether it was in response to a friend who lives in the vicinity of the location in the picture wondering where the wolf was,...

I don't care enough to bother finding out, but seems like the BBC could have done some more journalism, if they were so inclined.

[Wowfunhappy]

I can't decide how I feel about this.

The thing is, there's basically no reason to create this photo other than to mislead the authorities. It's purposefully blurry and not aesthetically pleasing. I cannot come up with any plausible artistic intent.

This could have happened without AI. Imagine if the police were trying to catch a serial killer, and I posted on Twitter that I saw him in a small town in Idaho or wherever, not because I had any real information but because I thought it would be amusing to create chaos. Maybe I'd create a bunch of sock puppet accounts with correlated sightings. At no point would I explicitly make a false police report, but the fake posts would get noticed all the same.

Is this illegal? I have no idea, I'm not a lawyer—but it feels like the sort of thing you'd want to have laws against. I'm not sure whether you'd run into first amendment issues in the United States.

[TwoNineFive]

I like this reply. It's nuanced. This guy didn't post that picture to be helpful. He did it to troll, and trolling is cruelty, and defending cruelty is immoral.

[zugi]

Ture but it starts off with basically argument from ignorance (or lack of imagination):

> there's basically no reason to create this photo other than to mislead the authorities

There are many other "for fun" possibilities: impress his friends, impress internet followers, impress a girl, play around with AI...

They've charged him with "disrupting government work by deception." It will be interesting to see whether that South Korean law requires proof of intent or just proof of the consequences. If he directed to authorities, he's in trouble, but if he posted it anywhere else it likely qualifies as free speech.

[thebruce87m]

> It seems the police just read a post by a random person on the internet, assumed it’s true

If it was true and police saw it but didn’t act, the fallout for them could be much worse depending on the outcome.

[rubslopes]

If this was true, they should have contacted the user nevertheless.

[sigbottle]

That was the impression I got as well, but it seems like other people disagree.

[Joker_vD]

It's always amusing to see what crimes people demand to have strict liability for, yes. "He posted a wrong location online, of course that'd disrupt the search for the wolf, right to jail, right away".

[dfxm12]

Authorities also presented the AI image during a press briefing on the runaway wolf, local media reported. ... Authorities did not specify if the man had intentionally sent the photo to authorities during their search or simply shared it online.

With the info presented in the article, it sounds like the cops jumped to conclusions, got publicly embarrassed and are now going after him to either save face or get revenge (depending on how credulous you are of LEO).