Yeah, it is frankly just plain bad epistemology to expect an AI chatbot to have answers on a matter such as this. Like trying to get this week's lotto numbers by seeking a reading in bible passages and verses. There is no way that the information was encoded within in there as it would violate causality. At best you'd have coincidental collisions only.
> Almost 700 schools throughout Poland were in May last year targeted by hoax bomb threats during key exams, private Polish radio broadcaster RMF FM reported.
> It cited Polish investigators it did not name as saying that a detailed analysis of internet connections and a thorough examination of the content of emails with false bomb threats turned up ties to servers in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.
It's a bit of a non story, even with the fake image.
From the article:
Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.
...
Railway expert Tony Miles said due to the timing of the incident, very few passengers will have been impacted by the hoax as the services passing through at that time were primarily freight and sleeper trains.
"They generally go slow so as not to disturb the passengers trying to sleep - this means they have a bit of leeway to go faster and make up time if they encounter a delay," he said.
"It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."
Standard responsible rail maintainance is to investigate rail integrity following heavy rains, earthquakes, etc.
A fake image of a stone bridge with fallen parapets prompts the same response as a phone call about a fallen stone from a bridge or (ideally !!) just the earthquake itself - send out a hi-railer for a track inspection.
The larger story here (be it the UK, the US, or AU) is track inspections .. manned or unmanned?
on the decision to veer toward unmanned inspections that rely upon lidar, gauge measures, crack vibration sensing etc.
Personally I veer toward manned patrols with state of the art instrumentation - for the rail I'm familiar with there are things that can happen with ballast that are best picked up by a human, for now.
> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.
> "The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer," a spokesperson said.
I don't think this will work the way they think it will work. In fact, I think they just proved they're vulnerable to a type of attack that causes disruption and completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer
The BBC says the hoaxer should consider the effect on other people. Should Sir Keir, who wants to "turbocharge" "AI", perhaps consider the effect on other people?
So far we have almost no positive applications for the IP laundering machines.
Much of the world relies on general well-behavedness. The whole Andon principle doesn’t work if you’ve got asshole employees. With the public you don’t have a choice. You have to stop the trains because otherwise everyone will murder you if it turned out to be true. So better to be defensive.
I think we’re just getting started, with fake images and videos.
I suspect that people will be killed, because of outrage over fake stuff. Before the Ukraine invasion, some of the folks in Donbas made a fake bomb, complete with corpses from a morgue (with autopsy scars)[0]. That didn’t require any AI at all.
We can expect videos of unpopular minorities, doing horrible things, politicians saying stuff they never said, and evidence submitted to trial, that was completely made from whole cloth.
People were able to make very realistic fakes of anything 10-20 years ago, using basic tools. Just ask the UFO nuts or the NSFW media enthusiasts. And like what you mentioned, staged scenes have become somewhat common as well, including before the internet.
We can expect more of the same. Random unverified photo and video should not be trusted, not in 2005, not in 2015, and not today.
I believe that this "everything was fine but it's going to get really bad" narrative is just yet another attempt at regulatory capture, to outlaw open-source AI. This entire fake bridge collapse might very well be a false flag to scare senile regulators.
What this incident really shows is the growing gap between how easy it is to create a convincing warning and how costly it is to verify what's actually happening. Hoaxes aren't new, but generative tools make fabrication almost free and massively increase the volume.
The rail operator didn't do anything wrong. After an earthquake and a realistic-looking image, the only responsible action is to treat it as potentially real and inspect the track.
This wasn't catastrophic, but it's a preview of a world where a single person can cheaply trigger high-cost responses. The systems we build will have to adapt, not by ignoring social media reports, but by developing faster, more resilient ways to distinguish signal from noise.
Would calling and saying, "Hey, the bridge is destroyed!" without an image not have also triggered a delay? I question the safety standards of the railway if they would just ignore such a call after an earthquake. Generative AI doesn't change the situation at all. An image shouldn't be treated as carrying more weight than a statement, but the statement without the image would be the same in this situation. This has really been an issue since the popularization of the telephone, which made it sufficiently easy to communicate a lie from far away that someone might choose to do so for fun.
Calling identifies one person by name/number, and makes that person liable for any damages from the hoax, similar to how calling in a fake bomb threat is a crime. Publicly posting a fake comment and waiting for the rail operator to react of their own volition removes liability from that individual. That's where the AI footage comes in: it makes it more likely for the hoax to be taken serious.
Great comment and very true in this AI world. In 2030 it will be even easier to make even more realistic images much quicker...
Reminds me of the attacker vs defender dilemma in cybersecurity - attackers just need one attack to succeed while a defender must spend resources considering and defending against all the different possibilities.
From 1950 - 2005(ish) there were a small number of sources due to the enormous moat required to become a broadcaster. From 2005 to 2021, you could mostly trust video as the costs of casual fakery were prohibitive. Now that the cost to produce fake videos are near zero, I suspect we will return to a much smaller number of sources (though not as small as in the pre YouTube era).
You don't need AI to make these hoaxes, pranks have been around forever etc etc.... but as with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. In this case the low barrier to creating the fake media coupled with the pervasiveness of social media networks and their reach (also networks that aren't new), affording the rapid deployment and significant impact by bad actors.
The problem is the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it.
Freight transport is cost-effective in terms of delays, approx. 2mn per minute in the three Pacific Railroad Surveys for a trans-contiental railroad by the War Department circa. 1850.
LLM AI has led to job losses (either indirectly for moving investments into AI instead of people) or directly. Generative imagery has and will lead to more bullshit election outcomes, people getting blackmailed, scamed, things like this train stoppage etc etc. The list is endless. Not even getting into how the AI bubble burst will make most of us poor when the huge stock market crash comes, but hey whatever...
What good has it brought us (not the billionaire owners of AI)? It made us 'more effective' and oh instead of googling something and actually going to a link reading in detail the result we can now not bother with any of that and just believe whatever the LLM outputs (hallucinations be damned).
So I guess that's an upside.
(before the AI god bros come: I am talking purely about LLMs and generative imagery and videos, not ML or AI used for research et al)
In a extreme safety-first organisation — and the GB railway is exactly that — it's easy to exploit that weakness.
It actually had very minimal impact. An hour or two wasn't bad for an organisation which stripped staff to a bare minimum, and for the area.
And it's very much the customer's job to work for the railway these days: it's our job to report police matters we are told incessantly with announcements.
It's our job to buy the right ticket as there are very few ticket staff and staff with any knowledge these days. It's our job to use third party websites during disruption and to Tweet the railway company for assistance because again there is not enough staff.
So Network Rail is not going to come out and say "it's absolutely our job to be aware of all our infrastructure at all times and our defence to this new threat is to bolster staff and CCTV and reduce our reliance on third party reports"
>"It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."
It is no surprise to me that Network rail are so understaffed that any special event disrupts their work schedules for days. That is what they call 'efficiency' these days.
Edit: Aside. During a set of fire service strikes it was a relatively common opinion to say something like, 'of course they have an easy job, they get paid to just sit/lie down at the station'. I used to ask, 'what would you like them to do while waiting in case you need rescuing?'. No answer. I spoke to a fireman and he told me that in response to this kind of nonsense a bunch of pointless busy work was invented for them. When real was privatised in the UK they fired a lot of these 'inefficient' workers. After a string of rain crashes, the government had to renationalise Network Rail (the bit that maintains the infrastructure). Another case where 'efficiency' means harming people for profit.
The issue is provenance. We need cameras and phones to digitally sign photos so we can easily verify an unadulterated image.
You also want to be able chain signing so that for example a news reporter could take a photo, then the news outlet could attest its authenticity by adding their signature on top.
Same principle could be applied to video and text.
Law of Buddha: Older tech will have less side effects and more benefits, while modern tech will mostly have side-effects only. Because the older tech came out of need, while modern tech comes out of greed.
Modern tech annoys older tech, like birds poking at dinosaurs. Trains enabled economic progress, which gave rise to computers and AI.
> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.
Perhaps Network Rail should have a system of asserting rail integrity that is independent of social media (?!!?)
37 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 94.8 ms ] threadThe image is likely AI generated in this case, but this does not seem like the best strategy for finding out if an image is AI generated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_sabotage_operations_in...
See e.g. https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7785/artykul/2508878,russian... (2020)
> Almost 700 schools throughout Poland were in May last year targeted by hoax bomb threats during key exams, private Polish radio broadcaster RMF FM reported.
> It cited Polish investigators it did not name as saying that a detailed analysis of internet connections and a thorough examination of the content of emails with false bomb threats turned up ties to servers in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.
From the article:
... Standard responsible rail maintainance is to investigate rail integrity following heavy rains, earthquakes, etc.A fake image of a stone bridge with fallen parapets prompts the same response as a phone call about a fallen stone from a bridge or (ideally !!) just the earthquake itself - send out a hi-railer for a track inspection.
The larger story here (be it the UK, the US, or AU) is track inspections .. manned or unmanned?
Currently on HN: Railroads will be allowed to reduce inspections and rely more on technology (US) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177550
https://apnews.com/article/automated-railroad-track-inspecti...
on the decision to veer toward unmanned inspections that rely upon lidar, gauge measures, crack vibration sensing etc.
Personally I veer toward manned patrols with state of the art instrumentation - for the rail I'm familiar with there are things that can happen with ballast that are best picked up by a human, for now.
> "The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer," a spokesperson said.
I don't think this will work the way they think it will work. In fact, I think they just proved they're vulnerable to a type of attack that causes disruption and completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer
You can also just call the railroad and report the bridge as damaged.
Hoaxes and pranks and fake threats have been around forever.
So far we have almost no positive applications for the IP laundering machines.
They do ... that's why sociopaths do such things.
I suspect that people will be killed, because of outrage over fake stuff. Before the Ukraine invasion, some of the folks in Donbas made a fake bomb, complete with corpses from a morgue (with autopsy scars)[0]. That didn’t require any AI at all.
We can expect videos of unpopular minorities, doing horrible things, politicians saying stuff they never said, and evidence submitted to trial, that was completely made from whole cloth.
It’s gonna suck.
[0] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/28/exploiting-cadave...
We can expect more of the same. Random unverified photo and video should not be trusted, not in 2005, not in 2015, and not today.
I believe that this "everything was fine but it's going to get really bad" narrative is just yet another attempt at regulatory capture, to outlaw open-source AI. This entire fake bridge collapse might very well be a false flag to scare senile regulators.
The rail operator didn't do anything wrong. After an earthquake and a realistic-looking image, the only responsible action is to treat it as potentially real and inspect the track.
This wasn't catastrophic, but it's a preview of a world where a single person can cheaply trigger high-cost responses. The systems we build will have to adapt, not by ignoring social media reports, but by developing faster, more resilient ways to distinguish signal from noise.
Reminds me of the attacker vs defender dilemma in cybersecurity - attackers just need one attack to succeed while a defender must spend resources considering and defending against all the different possibilities.
The problem is the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it.
QR leads you to a page, you upload image to page, hashes are compared, image-from-sensor confirmed.
Surely at this point we need provable ‘photography’ for the mass market.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Surveys
What good has it brought us (not the billionaire owners of AI)? It made us 'more effective' and oh instead of googling something and actually going to a link reading in detail the result we can now not bother with any of that and just believe whatever the LLM outputs (hallucinations be damned).
So I guess that's an upside.
(before the AI god bros come: I am talking purely about LLMs and generative imagery and videos, not ML or AI used for research et al)
It actually had very minimal impact. An hour or two wasn't bad for an organisation which stripped staff to a bare minimum, and for the area.
And it's very much the customer's job to work for the railway these days: it's our job to report police matters we are told incessantly with announcements. It's our job to buy the right ticket as there are very few ticket staff and staff with any knowledge these days. It's our job to use third party websites during disruption and to Tweet the railway company for assistance because again there is not enough staff.
So Network Rail is not going to come out and say "it's absolutely our job to be aware of all our infrastructure at all times and our defence to this new threat is to bolster staff and CCTV and reduce our reliance on third party reports"
It is no surprise to me that Network rail are so understaffed that any special event disrupts their work schedules for days. That is what they call 'efficiency' these days.
Edit: Aside. During a set of fire service strikes it was a relatively common opinion to say something like, 'of course they have an easy job, they get paid to just sit/lie down at the station'. I used to ask, 'what would you like them to do while waiting in case you need rescuing?'. No answer. I spoke to a fireman and he told me that in response to this kind of nonsense a bunch of pointless busy work was invented for them. When real was privatised in the UK they fired a lot of these 'inefficient' workers. After a string of rain crashes, the government had to renationalise Network Rail (the bit that maintains the infrastructure). Another case where 'efficiency' means harming people for profit.
You also want to be able chain signing so that for example a news reporter could take a photo, then the news outlet could attest its authenticity by adding their signature on top.
Same principle could be applied to video and text.
Modern tech annoys older tech, like birds poking at dinosaurs. Trains enabled economic progress, which gave rise to computers and AI.
Perhaps Network Rail should have a system of asserting rail integrity that is independent of social media (?!!?)
for real, pick up the phone and ask someone (??)