DEBUNK: AI Photo of Gunman Spreads Following Correspondents' dinner shooting
An AI photo of Cole Tomas Allen, 31, who is the man accused opening fire outside the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, made rounds hours after news broke about the shooting.
The image was purported to have come from Allen’s since-deleted Instagram page, with some commenters claiming that Instagram page was still up and active (that page isn’t him, I’ll get to that). New iterations of AI-image/video generators are being released regularly, many which lack any sort of guardrails to trace image provenance which would aid everyday folks in determining its veracity.
Bad actors have regularly used good old-fashioned misinformation (reusing old footage, photo editing) around times of breaking news events, but we should take note of this instance. The person who created this photo, did so with a haste and seeming ease that we should be paying attention to.
While I could stand on my soapbox all day screaming about regulations (especially the need for integrated watermarks on AI-generated content), I will leave that for another day, and instead provide a deeper look at how I determined this photo to be synthetic.
First, the source, who I will not link here, posted this early version of the photo leading me to believe it was them who originally uploaded it. This person regularly posts synthetic, and often anti-semitic, content and appears to regularly double down on the authenticity of the images they post.
Next, the Instagram page people claim to be Allen…is based in the UK.
A closer look reveals several oddities including inconsistent or incorrect lettering, an unidentifiable object attached to a bike, an a bit of merging between the subject’s pants and the couch.
Now onto the image itself:
If we get into smaller details, in a 2017 interview with Los Angeles local news outlet KABC-TV, we can see the subject’s nail beds are different than that seen in the photo.
Finally, the image lacks or creates entirely new features such as moles or a has a really pronounced tragus (that little piece of cartilage before your ear canal).
