A police department in Maine has been tripped up by modern photo editing after it posted an AI-generated image of a drug bust.
Westbrook Maine Police Department used ChatGPT to add its insignia to the photo, but officers were unaware that the AI edited the entire image and failed to spot that it had been significantly altered.
Followers of the department’s Facebook called foul when they noticed garbled text in the image and an unnatural sheen. Westbroke Maine PD usually place a real badge next to a bust but for some reason decided to use ChatGPT instead.
After initially denying that the image was AI-generated, the cops realized their error and took down the post, replacing it with an apology.
“After taking the photograph, the officer wanted to add in our department patch to identify Westbrook as the arresting agency,” Westbrook Maine Police Department writes on Facebook.
“To do this, the officer used a photoshop app to insert the department patch. The patch was added, and the photograph with the patch was sent to one of our Facebook administrators, who posted it.
“Unbeknownst to anyone, when the app added the patch, it altered the packaging and some of the other attributes on the photograph. None of us caught it or realized it.”
WGME reports that the “photoshop app” was in fact ChatGPT which primarily functions as a chatbot but also has a powerful AI image generator which users can not only generate images on but also upload their own photos to edit, as seen in the recent Studio Ghibli trend.
However, the cops didn’t realize that ChatGPT uses the uploaded picture as a prompt to create an AI image, and even though it looks similar to the real photo, it is effectively a novel image.
“We apologize for this oversight,” the Department says. “It was never our intent to alter the image of the evidence. We never realized that using a photoshop app to add our logo would alter a photograph so substantially.”
One concerned resident tells WGME that she wonders how much people really understand about AI technology.
“The fact that the person who posted it and put it through ChatGPT didn’t notice the differences because they were very obvious,” says Jessica Wellman.
Not only did the AI garble text on the packaging, but it actually removed some of the narcotics from the photo — making it difficult to understand how no one in the department noticed the error.
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