It was supposed to be a harmless prank.
Montgomery County police said Moesha Gardener sent her husband a text saying a man had broken into their Bethesda apartment, using AI to generate a fake picture of the home invader.
Police said the husband rushed home and called 911. When police arrived, they said Gardener was surprised, not realizing how seriously her joke had been taken.
“Sometimes they can have unintended consequences, and things can play out in ways you didn’t intend. That’s kind of what happened here,” said Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy.
Gardener was charged with making a false statement concerning an emergency/crime and providing a false statement to a state official. On Tuesday, she agreed to make a $1,000 donation to the police department in order to get the charges dismissed.
“It’s a pretty unusual case to kind of try to unravel, but you try to resolve it fairly,” McCarthy said. “I think this is a fair resolution, but I also think, you know, again, if you’re involved in some of these things, just think twice.”
Eight police units along with the woman’s husband were speeding through congested daytime traffic to make it to what they believed was a home invasion, and the concern was that the prank could’ve put the lives of officers and others in danger and delayed their response to a real emergency, according to charging documents.
“It was supposed to be a joke, but it used a very precious resource for us,” McCarthy said. “And she paid $1,000 because that’s what it cost the taxpayers in Montgomery County to respond to this.”
And while this case didn’t result in anything serious, it does highlight the potential dangers of AI-generated images. Companies like Reality Defender focus on creating deep-fake and AI-generated detection platforms and warn that these images are becoming so convincing, they can be nearly impossible to distinguish from reality.
“A year ago, we would have talked about anti-aliasing and pixelation and different kinds of symmetry or lack of symmetry. I would have given you a whole short list of telltale signs indicating manipulation or AI generation. In the last six months, it is all changed,” said Ben Coleman, the CEO and founder of Reality Defender.
Coleman said they’ve heard of instances of AI being used for “swatting,” which can have much more severe consequences. He hopes more guardrails are put in place to protect the public.
“I think this is incredibly scary, but I’m very optimistic,” he said. “I expect this time next year to have regulations that will require platforms to say, ‘Hey, this video that you got from your friend, from your loved one is AI-generated.’ It might be entertaining or it might be potentially nefarious, but at least you knowing that it’s AI is enough to make you make a better decision.”
As for Gardener, she has 90 days to pay the $1,000 to get her charges dismissed.
from Local – NBC4 Washington https://ift.tt/9Wsux6z
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