I admit it. I fell for it.
D. K. Wall:An image shared by my local television station. A gas station in the foreground. A tornado tearing a path of destruction in the background.
D. K. Wall:Just a sort of hurried, badly framed shot an amateur takes when faced with the anger of Mother Nature. Imagine my shock when I later discovered it was a fake generated by AI.
D. K. Wall:My motto is simple. My stories are 100% true except for the parts I make up. I proudly lie for a living, but at least I'm honest about my deception.
D. K. Wall:But when it comes to news, I prefer things to be more fact than fiction. I am not naive. My ever so brief collegiate flirtation with a career in journalism taught me the importance of skepticism.
D. K. Wall:I'm someone who aggressively checks facts obnoxiously so according to anyone who has ever made the mistake of showing me a headline at a dinner party.
D. K. Wall:If a newspaper reports that a study claims that hopping on one foot while chewing gum lowers the risk of lung cancer, they better include a link to the study itself.
D. K. Wall:I want to know which detail was cherry picked to build the headline. By what percentage the risk decreased, whether the left foot matters more than the right, and if the study was funded by the National Foot Hopping and Gum Chewing Council.
D. K. Wall:If you tell me a politician said something disparaging about Martians, I ask for the context, for what was said before and after. Was it in response to a question from someone living on Venus?
D. K. Wall:Then maybe I find out they simply said the red planet might not be the place to raise children, which is fair. No school district. No pediatricians. No atmosphere. And those Venus lobbyists are very well funded.
D. K. Wall:So, yes, maybe I am a doubting Thomas. Maybe I am not a good target for the latest rage bait on Facebook. I am not gullible.
D. K. Wall:I would never fall for some stupid photo stitched together out of bits and bites. Yet, it happened.
D. K. Wall:Last week, a wave of unsettled weather swept across the mountains of Western North Carolina. Severe thunderstorm watches were posted a day in advance. Regular updates warned of the approaching danger as the menace neared.
D. K. Wall:The watches morphed into warnings. No longer just potential, reality was coming in hard and fast.
D. K. Wall:When the storms hit, it was raucous. Flickering lightning, window rattling thunder, torrential rain, stiff wind, rivers and creeks rose, flash flooding bubbled up, and emergency services scrambled to answer every call.
D. K. Wall:Then the unthinkable. My phone screamed an alert. The National Weather Service issued a tornado warning, the first for Asheville since 2009.
D. K. Wall:During our brief few years living at the coast of South Carolina, tornadoes were an all too common occurrence, including one that tore a path less than a mile from our house.
D. K. Wall:Let's just say I appreciate living somewhere that measures decades between warnings. They are a rarity for our area because the mountains form such a barrier against those vicious beasts. But here we were with the command to take shelter immediately.
D. K. Wall:Another perk of mountain living, we have an actual basement to shelter in. Somehow, at the coast, sitting under a house built on pillars didn't give me that well protected feeling like the poured concrete walls of our new home.
D. K. Wall:Others across our region heeded the warnings. Even the city council abruptly broke off a meeting to take shelter, which is the fastest any city council has ever agreed on anything.
D. K. Wall:To be clear, the warning was valid. The National Weather Service has confirmed that an EF0 tornado touched down in Madison County just to our north.
D. K. Wall:Several people captured images of it and shared them with news media. One of those images showed a funnel moving near a gas station. And that image, it turned out, was fake.
D. K. Wall:The originator never meant for any of this. He made it as a joke and sent it privately to a few friends on Snapchat as part of a meme with no attempt to deceive anybody.
D. K. Wall:But one of those friends reposted it. Then strangers shared it. The joke text stripped away. TV stations picked it up. Even the National Weather Service thought the public should see it.
D. K. Wall:It spread the way a casserole recipe is shared at a church potluck. The secret ingredient is missing, but everyone assumes the person who handed them the scribbled directions wouldn't deceive them. And then everyone is surprised it doesn't quite taste right when cooked at home.
D. K. Wall:When the originator found out what was happening, he publicly posted saying it was a fake. He took responsibility for it and apologized. Quite rare nowadays, and I give huge credit for taking ownership.
D. K. Wall:Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped others from sharing it, believing it's real, or not caring that it's not. I've seen it in my feed many times.
D. K. Wall:As word of the deception got around though, a troubling trend developed. The fake's existence put every other image on trial. I have seen people argue that no tornado hit Madison County at all because one photo of it was fake.
D. K. Wall:But the National Weather Service has confirmed a tornado tore a path 75 yards wide for over a mile. Fortunately, in a remote stretch of mountains. The only victims were trees ripped out of the ground and turned into toothpicks.
D. K. Wall:The real damage though may be how AI is crumbling our ability to believe anything we see or hear. Because images and videos and text can be so easily faked, they proliferate. And unlike the early days, many of them are quite good.
D. K. Wall:A major crime story dominating the news this week is the unfortunate death of a young man during a party with his peers. Someone claimed they have enhanced audio that captures people admitting to the crime, while others think it was AI generated and totally fabricated.
D. K. Wall:Unlike the thousands of social media pundits positive where to point fingers, I don't know the truth and don't profess to. I wasn't there. Back to that doubting Thomas approach to life.
D. K. Wall:On the other end of the country, a flyer about a planned protest in a city rocked by protests had people changing their plans for the day.
D. K. Wall:Only, it turned out the organization depicted in the flyer said they had no such plans. It was all false. Somebody used AI to generate the whole thing.
D. K. Wall:The big news in the publishing world right now is a major multi million dollar book deal collapsed because the author has been accused of using AI. The author swears they did not.
D. K. Wall:Did they? I have no idea. I don't know the author. I have not read the manuscript because almost nobody has.
D. K. Wall:That has not slowed anyone down. Thousands of people who have no more access to the facts than I have are currently arguing about it and doing so with tremendous confidence.
D. K. Wall:That's the trouble, isn't it? My long standing habit of chasing a story back to its origins is losing ground to sources that look entirely real and are entirely invented.
D. K. Wall:I appreciate a good fiction. I make my living by spinning a good yarn. I just didn't expect the competition to arrive this fast, this good, and this willing to work for free.
D. K. Wall:So I guess I'm offering my motto over to the rest of the world, which apparently needs it more than I do. Everything you are told is 100% true except for the parts somebody made up.
D. K. Wall:I still think about that gas station, the pumps, the flat gray sky, the funnel in the distance. It was a good photograph. It simply was not a photograph.
D. K. Wall:I fell for a fake. Sadly, I fully expect I will fall for it again.