A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.

What the actual fuck? You couldn’t spare someone to just go look at the fucking thing rather than asking ChatGPT to spin you a tale? What are we even doing here, BBC?

A photo taken by a BBC North West Tonight reporter showed the bridge is undamaged

So they did. Why are we talking about ChatGPT then? You could just leave that part out. It’s useless. Obviously a fake photo has been manipulated. Why bother asking?

Devils advocate, AI might be an agent that detects tapering with a NLP frontend.

Not all AI is LLMs.

A “chatbot” is not a specialized AI.

(I feel like maybe I need to put this boilerplate in every comment about AI, but I’d hate that.) I’m not against AI or even chatbots. They have their uses. This is not using them appropriately.

A chatbot can be the user facing side of a specialized agent.

That’s actually how original change bots were. Siri didn’t know how to get the weather, it was able to classify the question as a weather question, parse time and location and which APIs to cash on those cases.

Okay I get you’re playing devil’s advocate here, but set that aside for a moment. Is it more likely that BBC has a specialized chatbot that orchestrates expert APIs including for analyzing photos, or that the reporter asked ChatGPT? Even in the unlikely event I’m wrong, what is the message to the audience? That ChatGPT can investigate just as well as BBC. Which may well be the case, but it oughtn’t be.

My second point still stands. If you sent someone to look at the thing and it’s fine, I can tell you the photo is fake or manipulated without even looking at the damn thing.