From The Washington Post
Police took over a week to name the NYC subway burning victim. A fake name spread in the meantime
By Melissa Goldin
It took police more than a week to publicly identify Debrina Kawam, 57, as the woman who was fatally set on fire in a New York subway train last month. But on the internet, it took just hours for a false name to begin spreading.
In posts that circulated widely on social media after Kawam’s death on Dec. 22, users claimed without evidence that the victim was a 29-year-old named “Amelia Carter.” These posts ricocheted across platforms, often accompanied by an image of a young woman that experts say may have been generated by artificial intelligence.
It’s not clear who first made up the claim or why. But many sharing it highlighted the immigration status of the man charged in Kawam’s death — federal immigration officials say he is a Guatemalan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally— while accusing the media of refusing to name the “beautiful young white woman...”
But the initial image that was shared in many of these posts had signs” of being created by a generative adversarial network — a type of AI that can be used for creating images of fake people that are difficult to distinguish from the real thing — said Hany Farid, a digital forensics and misinformation expert at the University of California, Berkeley.
Farid pointed to the nondescript nature of the headshot and the alignment of the eyes as indications that the image may have been AI generated, though he acknowledged that its low quality made it difficult to analyze properly...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley. He specializes in digital forensics.
