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by Wowfunhappy 59 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.
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.