Purportedly AI-Manipulated Synthetic Media Allegedly Fuels False Reports of Natural Disasters and Accidents in China

August 6, 2024

Incident involving fabrication and dissemination of false disaster reports using allegedly manipulated AI tools, including a landslide in Yunnan, an earthquake in Sichuan, and a traffic accident. Despite the real occurrence of a 5.0-magnitude earthquake in Muli County, Sichuan on May 27, 2024, social media posts falsely claimed a different epicenter and exaggerated the event's severity with fabricated images of destruction. Chinese authorities imposed administrative penalties on those responsible for spreading these false reports. This serves as an important reminder for the need of responsible AI governance, harm prevention measures, and safe and secure AI practices.

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Alleged deployer
yang-moumou, tian-mou, lou-moumou
Alleged developer
unknown-ai-developers, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
yunnan-general-public, xide-county-in-sichuan-residents, sichuan-general-public, muli-county-in-sichuan-residents, chinese-general-public, chinese-citizens, chengcheng-county-shaanxi-residents

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/835

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

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