An expert in the ethics of artificial intelligence says a fake image of a missing four-year-old in outback South Australia is concerning. Gus was last seen playing at his family's homestead, south of Yunta, on September 27.
00:00In recent days, a post has been circulating on social media platform Facebook, which features an AI-generated image of a young boy with long blonde curly hair, similar to that of missing boy Gus, being held by a man getting into a four-wheel drive.
00:16It's overlaid with the text, is this a kidnapping case? And that post also features the only publicly released image of Gus, that's the four-year-old boy who went missing on his family's homestead south of Yunta on Saturday, September 27.
00:31It sparked a large-scale search in the state's mid-north with army personnel, police and volunteers scouring the rural property, but to no avail.
00:40A drone search has just been completed of the property and we're expecting the results from that in the coming weeks.
00:47Rebecca Johnson is an expert in AI ethics at the University of Sydney and says that these kinds of AI-generated images are often created and posted as clickbait or to increase followers for an account.
00:59She says that these images can thrive in environments void of independent fact-checking and is urging people to check the origin of any information they come across online.
01:08This isn't the first AI-generated content to cause concern during the search for the missing boy.
01:14When the prompt Gus found was input into Meta AI or Facebook's AI search engine, it returned factually incorrect information, stating that Gus had been found after a massive search in the outback, which of course isn't the case.
01:29Gus is still missing.
01:30That prompted SA police to urge the public to only get information about the search from their official websites and platforms.
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