Maine police caught lying about using AI to alter drug bust photo

https://boingboing.net/2025/07/02/maine-police-caught-lying-about-using-ai-to-alter-drug-bust-photo.html

35•montroser•6mo ago

Comments

jmclnx•6mo ago

Welcome to policing in the US, seems worse then that now occurs :(

zihotki•6mo ago

I don't see it as lying, just not very handy with the tooling. As for why the patch wasn't there in the first place - it sometimes happens. Was it needed/required for a shared photo? Dunno. It doesn't look like a big deal considering the photo was not used in legal proceedings

jdonaldson•6mo ago

If it were just a simple copy/paste job with the patch, that's one thing. But the whole image has been turned into AI slop, with certain items moved, changed, or excluded. This just isn't an acceptable pattern for law enforcement communication of any kind.

filoeleven•6mo ago

> "This is NOT an AI-generated photo," Westbrook Police declared on Facebook when first questioned about oddities in their photos of seized meth and fentanyl. They doubled down, insisting "Westbrook PD is not and would never generate an AI photo to try and depict evidence."

So this was...what, then?

fallinghawks•6mo ago

I'm not sure why people are using AI for a task far better/easier done with a normal image editor. The badge could have been just superimposed at the top; it doesn't have to look like it was part of the original image. And if the photo carried legal implications (not this time), AI alteration would ruin that.

Edit. I'm pretty sure every AI photo editing app out there explicitly advertises that they use AI. Nobody wants to hide that feature. So I rather doubt the police claim that they thought they were using a normal photoshop app.

itsdrewmiller•6mo ago

“Take this picture and add the badge from foo bar police” is a lot easier than using any traditional image editor.

aspenmayer•6mo ago

Any savings in time or effort would be consumed by the subsequent public relations fallout and media response though, and probably then some.

leereeves•6mo ago

Or they just used the default photo editing app on Windows or Mac, which both use AI now.

financetechbro•6mo ago

You dont even need specialized software for this. You could literally do this in Microsoft PPT. This is like brining an atomic bomb to a fist fight - totally insane how AI is being treated like a Swiss Army knife

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