In addition to “the dog ate my homework,” “I didn’t see the email” and “It’s an honest oversight,” you can now add “the AI did it” to the list of excuses people may use to avoid taking responsibility for something they did or said.
Case in point: An Australian news station apologized after showing an altered photo of a member of parliament for the state of Victoria that it then claimed had been edited by an AI tool in Adobe Photoshop, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. But that apology — and the AI did it” excuse — came only after the politician, MP Georgie Purcell posted the original photo of her alongside the edited one on social media. Purcell said “having my body and outfit photoshopped by a media outlet” wasn’t something she expected in an otherwise busy day in which the Animal Justice Party member was pushing for changes to duck hunting rules.
“Note the enlarged boobs and outfit to be made more revealing. Can’t imagine this happening to a male MP,” Purcell wrote in her posting on X.
The news station, 9News, called it a “graphics error” and blamed it on Adobe rather than human error. “As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs. During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with our original,” the news director Hugh Nailon said in widely reported statement.
Adobe, which makes the popular photo editing tool, wasn’t having it and said any changes made to the image would have required “human intervention and approval.” The news station put out a subsequent statement saying there was, in fact, “human intervention in the decision.”
While the AI tool may have made changes consistent with selfie filters, Rob Nicholls, a professorial fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, told The New York Times that doesn’t explain why the news station didn’t check the image against the original. “Using AI without strong editorial controls runs the risk of making very significant errors,” he said, adding…
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