HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

ChatGPT-Generated Image of Nonexistent 'Homeless Man' Was Used in False St. Petersburg, Florida Burglary and Sexual Battery Reports

October 7, 2025

In a bizarre incident, a woman from St. Petersburg, Florida, Brooke Schinault, falsely reported a burglary and sexual battery that involved a nonexistent man. The image used in the report was found to be a ChatGPT-generated image of a 'homeless man', which turned out to be part of a viral prank. The report, dated before the alleged attack, led authorities, including police officers, rescue personnel, a detective, and forensic DNA collection team to respond. Schinault later pleaded no contest to misdemeanor false reporting. Join usJOIN US at HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM to learn more about the importance of responsible AI usage and harm prevention in such incidents.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
brooke-schinault
Alleged developer
openai
Alleged harmed parties
st.-petersburg-police-department, police-departments, people-needing-emergency-services, epistemic-integrity, emergency-responders

AI governance case studies

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1479

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.