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Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image

249 points by josephcsible

by ChrisMarshallNY

7 subcomments

I think we’re just getting started, with fake images and videos.
I suspect that people will be killed, because of outrage over fake stuff. Before the Ukraine invasion, some of the folks in Donbas made a fake bomb, complete with corpses from a morgue (with autopsy scars)[0]. That didn’t require any AI at all.
We can expect videos of unpopular minorities, doing horrible things, politicians saying stuff they never said, and evidence submitted to trial, that was completely made from whole cloth.
It’s gonna suck.
[0] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/28/exploiting-cadave...

by mr_windfrog

9 subcomments

What this incident really shows is the growing gap between how easy it is to create a convincing warning and how costly it is to verify what's actually happening. Hoaxes aren't new, but generative tools make fabrication almost free and massively increase the volume.
The rail operator didn't do anything wrong. After an earthquake and a realistic-looking image, the only responsible action is to treat it as potentially real and inspect the track.
This wasn't catastrophic, but it's a preview of a world where a single person can cheaply trigger high-cost responses. The systems we build will have to adapt, not by ignoring social media reports, but by developing faster, more resilient ways to distinguish signal from noise.

by rkachowski

6 subcomments

> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.
Perhaps Network Rail should have a system of asserting rail integrity that is independent of social media (?!!?)
for real, pick up the phone and ask someone (??)

by osigurdson

3 subcomments

From 1950 - 2005(ish) there were a small number of sources due to the enormous moat required to become a broadcaster. From 2005 to 2021, you could mostly trust video as the costs of casual fakery were prohibitive. Now that the cost to produce fake videos are near zero, I suspect we will return to a much smaller number of sources (though not as small as in the pre YouTube era).

by crazygringo

5 subcomments

To be clear, you don't need AI for this.
You can also just call the railroad and report the bridge as damaged.
Hoaxes and pranks and fake threats have been around forever.

by ceejayoz

1 subcomments

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell with the Moab plot point.

by squirrel

0 subcomment

Amazingly, no one seems to have actually checked that this picture was really "circulating on social media". I've been investigating for the past hour or so and can't locate a single public post or reference anywhere other than reposts of the BBC article.
Typically, postings that gain traction have many many reposts and though some may be deleted, there's a long tail of reverberation left behind. I can't find that at all here.
I wonder if the hoaxer just emailed it to Network Rail directly?

by tyushk

11 subcomments

> A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.
The image is likely AI generated in this case, but this does not seem like the best strategy for finding out if an image is AI generated.

by 627467

1 subcomments

> "It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."
Im way more concerned of this statement than whatever is reported in the title.
How fragile is a society that is unable to make a simple visual confirmation of a statement without having a multiday multi-££ impact?

by jameslk

1 subcomments

> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.
> "The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer," a spokesperson said.
I don't think this will work the way they think it will work. In fact, I think they just proved they're vulnerable to a type of attack that causes disruption and completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer

by baden1927

0 subcomment

Freight transport is cost-effective in terms of delays, approx. 2mn per minute in the three Pacific Railroad Surveys for a trans-contiental railroad by the War Department circa. 1850.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Surveys

by jen729w

3 subcomments

How hard could it be — genuine question — for, say, Apple (Nikon, Sony,…) to embed a QR code (optionally) into an image.
QR leads you to a page, you upload image to page, hashes are compared, image-from-sensor confirmed.
Surely at this point we need provable ‘photography’ for the mass market.

by informal007

1 subcomments

Cannot image how often this will happen after we are buried under fake contents from AI.

by danjc

1 subcomments

The issue is provenance. We need cameras and phones to digitally sign photos so we can easily verify an unadulterated image.
You also want to be able chain signing so that for example a news reporter could take a photo, then the news outlet could attest its authenticity by adding their signature on top.
Same principle could be applied to video and text.

by defrost

3 subcomments

It's a bit of a non story, even with the fake image.
From the article:
```
  Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.
```
...
```
  Railway expert Tony Miles said due to the timing of the incident, very few passengers will have been impacted by the hoax as the services passing through at that time were primarily freight and sleeper trains.

  "They generally go slow so as not to disturb the passengers trying to sleep - this means they have a bit of leeway to go faster and make up time if they encounter a delay," he said.

  "It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."
```
Standard responsible rail maintainance is to investigate rail integrity following heavy rains, earthquakes, etc.
A fake image of a stone bridge with fallen parapets prompts the same response as a phone call about a fallen stone from a bridge or (ideally !!) just the earthquake itself - send out a hi-railer for a track inspection.
The larger story here (be it the UK, the US, or AU) is track inspections .. manned or unmanned?
Currently on HN: Railroads will be allowed to reduce inspections and rely more on technology (US) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177550
https://apnews.com/article/automated-railroad-track-inspecti...
on the decision to veer toward unmanned inspections that rely upon lidar, gauge measures, crack vibration sensing etc.
Personally I veer toward manned patrols with state of the art instrumentation - for the rail I'm familiar with there are things that can happen with ballast that are best picked up by a human, for now.

by endofreach

0 subcomment

I mean what does anyone expect from a future where images like this can be generated by any moron for any place, in thousands of variations, with just a few clicks? And then video?
I am surprised headlines like this are only coming out now. I've been saying it for a long time, but people said i am crazy. The web as we know it will be unusable. And a new one will not solve all issues, as we have already made ourselves too dependent on the current web and tech. So the impact on the real world is gonna turn a lot if things upside down. It's gonna be a lot of fun. But sure, let's keep pretending AI can either be nothing but bullshit OR we should only fear losing jobs to robots... i don't get why no one every thinks about the societal impact... it's so obvious, still... i am baffled...

by jimnotgym

0 subcomment

>"It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."
It is no surprise to me that Network rail are so understaffed that any special event disrupts their work schedules for days. That is what they call 'efficiency' these days.
Edit: Aside. During a set of fire service strikes it was a relatively common opinion to say something like, 'of course they have an easy job, they get paid to just sit/lie down at the station'. I used to ask, 'what would you like them to do while waiting in case you need rescuing?'. No answer. I spoke to a fireman and he told me that in response to this kind of nonsense a bunch of pointless busy work was invented for them. When real was privatised in the UK they fired a lot of these 'inefficient' workers. After a string of rain crashes, the government had to renationalise Network Rail (the bit that maintains the infrastructure). Another case where 'efficiency' means harming people for profit.

0 subcomment

by insane_dreamer

0 subcomment

Another way that AI is literally destroying the Internet.
Despite using Claude Code almost daily and finding it a useful tool, on balance I think that AI is a net negative to society.

by human_llm

0 subcomment

Remember Moab

by hexbin010

1 subcomments

In a extreme safety-first organisation — and the GB railway is exactly that — it's easy to exploit that weakness.
It actually had very minimal impact. An hour or two wasn't bad for an organisation which stripped staff to a bare minimum, and for the area.
And it's very much the customer's job to work for the railway these days: it's our job to report police matters we are told incessantly with announcements. It's our job to buy the right ticket as there are very few ticket staff and staff with any knowledge these days. It's our job to use third party websites during disruption and to Tweet the railway company for assistance because again there is not enough staff.
So Network Rail is not going to come out and say "it's absolutely our job to be aware of all our infrastructure at all times and our defence to this new threat is to bolster staff and CCTV and reduce our reliance on third party reports"

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

You don't need AI to make these hoaxes, pranks have been around forever etc etc.... but as with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. In this case the low barrier to creating the fake media coupled with the pervasiveness of social media networks and their reach (also networks that aren't new), affording the rapid deployment and significant impact by bad actors.
The problem is the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it.

by deadbabe

1 subcomments

Don’t trust, only verify.

by renewiltord

1 subcomments

Much of the world relies on general well-behavedness. The whole Andon principle doesn’t work if you’ve got asshole employees. With the public you don’t have a choice. You have to stop the trains because otherwise everyone will murder you if it turned out to be true. So better to be defensive.

by jibal

0 subcomment

"think about the serious impact it could have"
They do ... that's why sociopaths do such things.

by ulfw

2 subcomments

LLM AI has led to job losses (either indirectly for moving investments into AI instead of people) or directly. Generative imagery has and will lead to more bullshit election outcomes, people getting blackmailed, scamed, things like this train stoppage etc etc. The list is endless. Not even getting into how the AI bubble burst will make most of us poor when the huge stock market crash comes, but hey whatever...
What good has it brought us (not the billionaire owners of AI)? It made us 'more effective' and oh instead of googling something and actually going to a link reading in detail the result we can now not bother with any of that and just believe whatever the LLM outputs (hallucinations be damned).
So I guess that's an upside.
(before the AI god bros come: I am talking purely about LLMs and generative imagery and videos, not ML or AI used for research et al)

by lysace

4 subcomments

Yet another attack vector for the Russians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_sabotage_operations_in...
See e.g. https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7785/artykul/2508878,russian... (2020)
> Almost 700 schools throughout Poland were in May last year targeted by hoax bomb threats during key exams, private Polish radio broadcaster RMF FM reported.
> It cited Polish investigators it did not name as saying that a detailed analysis of internet connections and a thorough examination of the content of emails with false bomb threats turned up ties to servers in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.

by bgwalter

1 subcomments

The BBC says the hoaxer should consider the effect on other people. Should Sir Keir, who wants to "turbocharge" "AI", perhaps consider the effect on other people?
So far we have almost no positive applications for the IP laundering machines.

by zkmon

0 subcomment

Law of Buddha: Older tech will have less side effects and more benefits, while modern tech will mostly have side-effects only. Because the older tech came out of need, while modern tech comes out of greed.
Modern tech annoys older tech, like birds poking at dinosaurs. Trains enabled economic progress, which gave rise to computers and AI.