AI images, fake news plague Gus Lamont investigation
Thousands of people shared a shocking “update” on missing four-year-old Gus Lamont – it laid bare a very modern problem.
Fake images of Gus Lamont, who went missing in remote South Australia last month, have been used to spread misinformation about his fate online.
An image appearing to show Gus, 4, being bundled into a car by an “unfamiliar man” has been shared thousands of times on social media.
“An eyewitness reports seeing a boy matching Gus Lamont’s description with an unfamiliar man in a car about 100km from Yunta,” the caption of one post, shared 24,000 times, reads.
The problem is, the picture was generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
Gus vanished from his family’s 60,000ha homestead, located about 40km from the town of Yunta, on September 27.
Experts say the sharing of AI images can be “incredibly distressing” for family and friends connected to cases like Gus’.
“The challenge of stories that have shown to be newsworthy or share-worthy means that the continual push for clicks is blurring the lines between credible and non-credible updates,” missing-persons expert Dr Sarah Wayland told The Advertiser last week.
“When the community engages with these sites, pause and consider who is sharing the information, whether it’s verified by SAPOL, and what the usual focus of that page is.”
A full-scale search has so far yielded no sign of the little boy last seen by his grandmother about 5pm that day as he played in the dirt on the sheep station.
On October 7 South Australia Police Deputy Commissioner Linda Williams said the search had been scaled back “following medical experts advice that there was little hope for us to find Gus alive”.
Despite that, SAPOL continued the search for three more days with a significant search presence until Friday afternoon.
“The investigation is now being managed by Missing Persons Section, which is part of Major Crime Investigation Branch, and that’s where all long-term cases such as this are managed and investigated.”
Facebook’s Meta AI tool has also been found to have spread misinformation about clues purported to have been discovered in the search for Gus.
It said in a summary that “based on recent Facebook posts” detectives had found “Gus’s toy, which he was holding when disappeared, with blood on it”.
AAP FactCheckhas published a breakdown of false reports made by pages on social media which appeared to be using fake updates on Gus as clickbait.
One claimed searchers found a Minions shirt like the one Gus was wearing, while another claims detectives “burst into tears” when they found bloodstains and a body part.
SA Police Assistant Commissioner Ian Parrott has previously urged people to stop speculating and instead listen to official updates.
“There’s no evidence of foul play,” he said. “We believe Gus simply wandered off.
“If you were to put yourselves in the shoes of a family, who would be clearly distraught about the loss of a small child, it paints a little bit of a different picture.”
Jeannie Marie Paterson, a professor and co-founding director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics, said the use of AI in such cases raised huge ethical concerns.
“We are well past having the ability to identify ‘fakes’ from reality,” she told 7News.
“There are AI influencers, actors and now also AI deprecations of real or imagined events – often involving peoples’ lives and with the capacity to cause deep hurt, or even derail police investigations.”
Originally published as AI images, fake news plague Gus Lamont investigation
