Початкове змінене фото (зліва) та оригінал (справа) / Facebook
Police in Westbrook, Maine, USA, posted a photo of evidence seized in a drug trafficking case. However, AI was not the only factor involved.
How WMTW reports from Portland, Maine (unavailable from Ukraine, VPN required), police in the suburb of Westbrook had to apologize not only for the photo altered by artificial intelligence, but also for the false explanation of this fact.
The police initially posted the altered photo on their Facebook page on Sunday, June 29. The photo was part of a post informing the public about an arrest in a drug case made on Tuesday, June 24. On Tuesday, July 1, the police published another post on Facebook. It stated that the department had received several phone calls and messages from people who wanted to know why the photo created by artificial intelligence was used in Sunday’s post.
«We want to set the record straight — this is NOT a photo created by artificial intelligence. What you are seeing was seized by officers during the arrests. Does the strange package contain gibberish or a foreign language? Yes, it does. But this is what the officers found and seized. The packaging is most likely foreign, and it is possible that whoever made it used artificial intelligence to create a clearly fake package.
What we seized is not uncommon for us during drug arrests. Illegal drugs and related paraphernalia are manufactured and sold in an illegal way. This is not the same as going to a reputable store and buying goods from a well-known manufacturer. We assure you that the Westbrook Police Department does not and will never create artificially intelligent photographs to depict seized evidence».
But the initial and subsequent posts were removed from the department’s Facebook page on Tuesday afternoon. The police admitted that the original photo had indeed been altered. The department also released the original photo of the seized drugs, which was taken by an officer involved in the operation.
According to the police, the officer wanted to add a department patch to the photo to identify the department that made the arrest. He used Photoshopto insert a patch on the image, and then shared the image with one of the department administrators on Facebook, who posted the photo. However, Westbrook Police Captain Steve Goldberg said that the officer used ChatGPT.
«No one knew that when the program added the patch, it changed the packaging and some other details in the photo. None of us noticed or realized this. We apologize for this oversight. It was never our intention to alter the evidence image. We never realized that using the Photoshop program to add our logo would change the photo so significantly».
The Westbrook Police Department said it considered the incident a valuable lesson. The altered image distracted from the message the police wanted to convey, namely that dangerous drugs had been seized.