AI-generated images fool Spokane city officials twice in six days
Tragedy struck in Spokane in late June when a man allegedly killed a small dog in a domestic violence dispute.
Local police issued a news release on July 1 highlighting the man’s arrest.
Except the dog wasn’t dead, only seriously injured. In a happy correction, the police department released a photo of the responding officer holding up a dachshund with one of its front legs in a cast. The officer is beaming; the dog is calm.
Except the officer was undercover, so the police department rushed to ask media not to run the photo after all. The Spokesman-Review cropped the photo to remove any identifying features of the officer, publishing a small image of the dog in the officer’s hands.
Except what police officials didn’t say initially was that the photo was also fake, an AI-generated fabrication. The officer was real, and really undercover; everything else was a fiction.
A close examination could have revealed as much. The officer and dog are standing in front of an open garage, filled with assorted junk including empty boxes of “ZEDO SUGAR” and “BEASY” energy drinks. The image itself doesn’t make much sense – why is the dog’s leg already in a cast if the officer just rescued it?
But by far the most glaring detail is the officer’s sidearm, which appears to be the kind of flintlock pistol a Caribbean pirate might have used.
The evidence of fakery was right there, and it was missed by several people before appearing in the paper, each person trusting the person before them.
Originally created by detectives as a joke, the photo was passed along to a supervisor who believed it to be real, wrote Tricia Leming, an SPD public information officer. A different communications official asked around for any photos of the incident, and the supervisor unknowingly passed the image on. At no point did anyone knowingly attempt to trick anyone else.
But that lack of malice only highlights the risks posed by this technology. As generative AI has in recent years become able to create images that are increasingly indiscernible from the real thing, it’s not just the average consumer at risk of unknowingly passing along a computer-generated image, but also businesses and governments.
“This incident highlights the risks to public government as AI-generated content becomes more common and accessible,” Leming wrote in an email. “In the case of SPD, it was a genuine mistake, but it serves as a teachable moment for public government that verification processes, or a check-and-balance procedure, need to occur before images are shared publicly.”
“We are using this incident to review and strengthen our internal processes so that it does not happen again,” Leming said. “We would encourage other organizations to do the same.”
Some of those organizations may be elsewhere in the city.
July started with a cultural victory for Mayor Lisa Brown. For years, the iconic Great Northern Clocktower in Riverfront Park had been a silent sentry over the Spokane River, but Brown had taken the initiative to restore its chime. It would ring for the first time in a decade on the Fourth of July, and the mayor wanted the public to attend the morning restoration ceremony. There were social media posts, a push for local media to highlight the event, and flyers created.
Artist Matthew Clinard had moved out of Spokane a few years ago, but he still followed events in the city closely enough that it wasn’t unusual for a flyer for the clock tower event to appear on his social media.
“I stopped for a second and thought something about this looks familiar,” Clinard said in an interview.
It should have, given the poster was a blatant ripoff of a popular sticker Clinard had created commemorating the Clocktower. The stylized clouds, trees, bushes and sun were a one-to-one match. The pastel color schemes are identical. There were a few minor tweaks to the clock tower, mainly that the poster pushed out by the city displayed two sides of the building, but it was clearly still Clinard’s style.
The poster, as it turns out, was AI-generated.
And almost no one in the city, except the employee who created it, knew that until Clinard posted about the plagiarism on social media, according to city officials. He suspected it was an accident when he made the post, but art isn’t just his passion; it’s his livelihood. He sells the sticker online and in at least one Spokane store.
The mayor’s office took down the photo immediately and contacted Clinard to apologize, he said.
“They were super apologetic and made it clear that Lisa Brown wants to be seen as a mayor that supports the arts,” he said. “I wanted to be supportive of that, but at the same time tell people that it’s not OK. It’s a good resolution to the situation, but at the same time, I wanted to leave up the video.”
While it was the mayor’s office that distributed the poster, it wasn’t someone in their office who made it, explained city spokesperson Erin Hut in an interview. An employee in the parks department, which is largely independent from the rest of city government, used AI to create the flyer without acknowledging how it was created – itself a violation of city policy, which requires all AI-generated material to include a disclosure that it was made by a computer.
“(Clinard) was rightfully upset,” Hut said, noting that the mayor’s cabinet has already convened to begin discussing reforms to the city’s AI policy.
“I think there are potential uses for AI in city government to provide some efficiency, but government also needs to be transparent and accountable, and there’s an ethical line here,” Hut added. “We need to equip our people with the understanding of how to appropriately use those tools. In this instance, our takeaway is, using generative AI to create an image is likely not going to use-case for us.”
Both the Clocktower flyer and police news release highlight the difficulty in creating a policy for a technology that is becoming increasingly competent at mimicking human-made images, Hut acknowledged.
“I don’t know that you can respond to that as a policy, but one thing we have been working on is professional development and additional training for our employees … and I think this is a great opportunity for us as a communication team that we need to do training around AI and how to identify it, how to use it ethically, when and when not to use it – and I think those resources are out there.”
Though the flyer seems to solely plagiarize Clinard’s art, the employee who created it claimed to have asked only for “a 70s vibe,” “colorful and retro-feeling,” according to Fianna Dickson, a parks department spokesperson.
For Clinard, the incident isn’t just a reminder of the danger of AI-generated images being passed off as man-made, but of the inherent threat to working artists. Perhaps no one stole his work intentionally in this case – and he stressed that the city was responding appropriately – but his art was stolen nonetheless.
“All these AI-generative AI models are just scouring the internet looking at everybody’s work, and nobody signed up to say, ‘yeah use my work to train these things,’ ” he said. “It’s such a huge issue, it’s widespread theft on such a large scale that nobody can really do anything about it.”