HS Analysis | Kamala Harris did not run over the girl and run away, even though “Alicia” said so

We live dangerous times. Or do we live? Or is this just the beginning?

Last Monday, KBSF – San Francisco News reported on its website a shocking story about a 13-year-old black girl About Alicia Brownwho said he remained the vice president of the United States Horrible Harris under the car you are driving. Harris had fled the scene, the girl was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

All of this happened, according to KBSF, in San Francisco in June 2011, when Harris was California’s attorney general. Harris’s people had previously intimidated the girl and her mother into keeping quiet about the incident.

Except none of this is true. KBSF is a fake news site that has since gone or been taken down. However, the “news” and Brown’s “video interview” were diligently shared on several social media platforms. About seven million people had time to see it on the X service alone, The CBS channel tells.

France24 website by social detectives started to investigate the video and according to the suspicions of some X users, the Brown who spoke in the video was created with the help of artificial intelligence. In one part of the video, the second wheel of the wheelchair disappeared, in another part Brown’s left hand – it was proven.

HS has watched the video found in the online archive and it really looks like the right wheel of the wheelchair disappears in the middle of the interview. But that might be explained by the change in viewing angle. And the hand could later be in the sleeve of the girl’s hoodie. Maybe it wasn’t the AI ​​hallucinating after all?

On video the allegedly X-ray image of the girl shown is, according to CBS, apparently taken from a scientific publication, and a picture showing a car accident from a crash that happened on the island of Guam in 2018. San Francisco police could not find any information about the alleged accident.

A professor at UC Berkeley who is familiar with digital crime research, interviewed by the CBS channel Hany Farid found no signs that the video was created by artificial intelligence. He believed it was a stage play, a play.

“We’re so obsessed with generative AI these days that we forget we don’t need technology to lie,” Farid told CBS.

For the rest confusion remains. Fake news and video shared forward, for example, the pro-Russian Australian propagandist Aussie Cossack, by real name Simeon Boykov. He asked if knowledge of the accident would lead to the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris losing the presidential election in November to the Republican For Donald Trump.

Was Alicia Brown, whose first name was also in the form Alisha in the “news”, created by artificial intelligence or was it just a videoed play? The fact that the matter is not clear at first glance underlines how the contents created with artificial intelligence are starting to resemble real documentation dangerously.

The US election can be decided by only a few tens of thousands of votes, and at least in principle, such a shocking “news” could influence some people’s voting decisions at a crucial moment.

The situation it doesn’t make it any easier that the owner of the X service, the former Twitter, the richest man in the world and a Trump-winner Elon Musk distributes content created with artificial intelligence on its own X page.

“Kamala promises to become a communist dictator on his first day in office. Can you believe she wears an outfit like that?” Musk tweeted last Monday, posting a photo of Harris wearing a red outfit and a red communist cap decorated with a hammer and sickle.

Any average X user could see that it was a joke by Musk, known for his twisted humor, to which many responded with counter-jokes created by AI.

One X user posted a picture showing Musk dressed in a Nazi outfit. And another picture where Trump was wearing a communist uniform with a Soviet flag in the background.

Turkey in the presidential election in May 2023, a marginal candidate named Muharrem İnce left three days before the election in the middle of his campaign, while in the X service a video was releasedwhere he appeared to be having sex with a woman.

According to İnce, the video was fake. The main candidate of the opposition hastened to say the same Kemal Kılıçdaroğluwho accused “our dear Russian friends” of using AI to smear İnce.

What remained was confusion. İnce’s fall from the presidential race was an event that could be expected to benefit Kılıçdaroğlu. Therefore, it was in the latter’s interest to quickly deny that his campaign had anything to do with it.

Russia, for its part, denied meddling in the Turkish elections. The video’s effect on the election may have been negligible, but the winner was the sitting president anyway Recep Tayyip Erdoğanwho has fraternized with the Russian president Vladimir Putin with.

Stateside there is taken care of that Russia, China and Iran are all trying to influence the country’s elections. Artificial intelligence with the help of various dirty tricks doing it is easier, cheaper and faster.

There are also
those who think there is no point in exaggerating the threat images caused by artificial intelligence. Even though all kinds of artificial intelligence-generated hype can be seen more and more on social media, rarely do the products affect large groups of people.

The Alan Turing Institute, which is based in the United Kingdom and researches artificial intelligence, published in May the reportwhich had studied 112 national election events since the beginning of 2023. According to the institute, artificial intelligence had been tried to influence the election result in “only” 19 elections.

Nowhere in the world were there any signs that the election result would have differed significantly from the pre-election polls. So all is well, at least in May 2024.