Staying Fit
In the photograph, Lionel Messi holds an Israeli flag. A screenshot showing the image on the soccer star’s Instagram page Oct. 31 was widely shared on Facebook and X. But the photo was a phony. In the actual shot, he held a sign for Icons.com, a sport memorabilia company — not a flag. And the real photo appeared on Icon’s site — not on Messi’s Instagram page.
Manipulated images and fraudulent photos generated with artificial intelligence are proliferating online — and the problem will surely grow. Fifty-eight percent of Americans think that AI tools will increase the spread of false information during the 2024 election, according to a poll released in November by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.
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And fakes can be hard to spot. In a 2022 study in the journal Vision Research, participants not only struggled to distinguish real faces from fake faces but sometimes “believed fake faces to be more real than real faces.”
And in an October survey by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, more than half of boomer and Gen X respondents confessed they weren’t confident about distinguishing between AI- and human-generated content. Here are ways to tell what’s real — and ensure that you aren’t sharing false images with others.
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