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Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image
- ceejayoz 11mo agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell with the Moab plot point.
- joshstrange 11mo agoI really liked the first half to 3/4ths of the that book. The last part was less interesting to me but the Moab plot line and all the parts around anonymity/online presence I enjoyed.
- tyushk 11mo ago> A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated. The image is likely AI generated in this case, but this does not seem like the best strategy for finding out if an image is AI generated.
- 1659447091 11mo agoUnder the other photos it says A photo taken by a BBC North West Tonight reporter showed the bridge is undamaged and A BBC North West reporter visited the bridge today and confirmed it was undamaged They may have first ran the photo through an AI, but they also went out to verify. Or ran it after verification to understand it better, maybe
- lazystar 11mo agoSo.. is this where the AI hype train starts to lose steam? One AI hallucinated and caused the incident, and another AI program just wasted everyone's time after it was unable to verify the issue. Sounds like AI was utterly useless to everyone involved.
- ceejayoz 11mo ago> Sounds like AI was utterly useless to everyone involved. Not the hoaxer!
- 1659447091 11mo ago> Sounds like AI was utterly useless to everyone involved Maybe. Imo, I think the advances in AI and the hype toward generated everything will actually be the current societies digitally-obsessed course-correction back to having a greater emphases on things like theater, live music, conversing with people in-person or even strangers (the horror, I know) simply to connect/consume more meaningfully. It'll level out integrating both instead of being so digitally loop-sided as humans adapt to enjoy both.* To me, this shows a need for more local journalism that has been decimated by the digital world. By journalism, I mean it in a more traditional sense, not bloggers and podcast (no shade some follow principled, journalistic integrity -- as some national "traditional" one don't). Local journalism is usually held to account by the community, and even though the worldwide BBC site has this story, it was the local reporters they had that were able to verify. If these AI stories/events accelerate a return to local reporting with a worldwide audience, then all the better. * I try to be a realist, but when I err, it tends to be on the optimist side
- nicoburns 11mo agoThe tech giants sucking up all the ad revenue is what killed local journalism. Unless you can find a solution to that problem (or an alternstove fundong model), it's not coming back.
- DrewADesign 11mo agoBut just think of all the people that didn’t have to receive a paycheck because of all this efficiency! It’s really incredible how the supposedly unassailable judgement of mass consumer preference consistently leads our society to produce worse shit so we can have more or it, and rewards the chief enshittifiers with mega yachts.
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- vkou 11mo agoIt's not, but when you have 30 minutes to ship a story...
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- Blackthorn 11mo agoYeah, talk about begging the question. Yikes.
- informal007 11mo agoThis is the fast way they can try, but it shouldn't be the most trustworthy way and shouldn't be in report.
- skissane 11mo agoSomeone I know is a high school English teacher (being vague because I don’t want to cause them trouble or embarrassment). They told me they were asking ChatGPT to tell them whether their students’ creative writing assignments were AI-generated or not-I pointed out that LLMs such as ChatGPT have poor reliability at this; classifier models trained specifically for this task perform somewhat better, yet also have their limitations. In any event, if the student has access to whatever model the teacher is using to test for AI-generation (or even comparable models), they can always respond adversarially by tinkering with an AI-generated story until it is no longer classified as AI-generated
- techjamie 11mo agoReminds me of a Reddit story that made the rounds about a professor asking ChatGPT if it wrote papers, to which it frequently responded afirmatively. He sent an angry email about it, and a student responded by showing a response from ChatGPT claiming it wrote his email.
- gblargg 11mo ago> student responded by showing a response from ChatGPT claiming it wrote his email Which is actually fine. Students need to do their own homework. A teacher can delegate writing emails.
- arcanemachiner 11mo agoI believe you just got whooshed.
- MengerSponge 11mo agoA person arguing in favor of LLM use failed to comprehend the context or argument? Unpossible!
- gblargg 11mo ago
- maxlin 11mo agoYeah that hardly talks of the "journalist" being good at their job. At worst they asked a biased question like "has this photo been AI generated and if then how" or worse. People tend to think that AI is like a specific kind of human which knows other AI things better. But we should expect better from people that do writing as their job.
- Davidzheng 11mo agoIf it's nano banana you can give it to Gemini bc it has artifacts
- RestartKernel 11mo agoAll these tool integrations are making it increasingly difficult to explain to non-tech people what these chatbots are capable of. Even more so as multi-modality improves (at some point image generation went from a distinct tool to arguably an inherent part the the models).
- jameslk 11mo agoChatGPT: This looks like AI. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a bit of training data in my time.
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- hexbin010 11mo agoDo you not think even BBC "journalists" are suffering from immense pressures to use AI for efficiency? It's everywhere
- Nasrudith 11mo agoYeah, it is frankly just plain bad epistemology to expect an AI chatbot to have answers on a matter such as this. Like trying to get this week's lotto numbers by seeking a reading in bible passages and verses. There is no way that the information was encoded within in there as it would violate causality. At best you'd have coincidental collisions only.
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- lysace 11mo agoYet another attack vector for the Russians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_sabotage_operations_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_sabotage_operations_in... See e.g. https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7785/artykul/2508878,russian-agents-behind-hoax-bomb-threats-in-polish-schools-report https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7785/artykul/2508878,russian... (2020) > Almost 700 schools throughout Poland were in May last year targeted by hoax bomb threats during key exams, private Polish radio broadcaster RMF FM reported. > It cited Polish investigators it did not name as saying that a detailed analysis of internet connections and a thorough examination of the content of emails with false bomb threats turned up ties to servers in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.
- gerdesj 11mo agoAm I bovvered?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- SanjayMehta 11mo ago[flagged]
- loloquwowndueo 11mo ago> If your cat has worms, do you blame it on Russia or Best Korea? Best Korea of course. The Worst Korea could never do this kind of thing.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- alephnerd 11mo ago> Yet another attack vector AI-Generated disinfo has been a known attack vector for the Russian regime (and their allied regimes) for years now [0][1]. [0] - https://cyberscoop.com/russia-ukraine-china-iran-information-operations-mandiant/ https://cyberscoop.com/russia-ukraine-china-iran-information... [1] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/espionage-group-unc1151-likely-conducts-ghostwriter-influence-activity https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/esp...
- defrost 11mo agoIt's a bit of a non story, even with the fake image. From the article: Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake. ... Railway expert Tony Miles said due to the timing of the incident, very few passengers will have been impacted by the hoax as the services passing through at that time were primarily freight and sleeper trains. "They generally go slow so as not to disturb the passengers trying to sleep - this means they have a bit of leeway to go faster and make up time if they encounter a delay," he said. "It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days." Standard responsible rail maintainance is to investigate rail integrity following heavy rains, earthquakes, etc. A fake image of a stone bridge with fallen parapets prompts the same response as a phone call about a fallen stone from a bridge or (ideally !!) just the earthquake itself - send out a hi-railer for a track inspection. The larger story here (be it the UK, the US, or AU) is track inspections .. manned or unmanned? Currently on HN: Railroads will be allowed to reduce inspections and rely more on technology (US) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177550 https://apnews.com/article/automated-railroad-track-inspections-waiver-derailments-fra-d3c4b0f313585303e305e84fb4c03aef https://apnews.com/article/automated-railroad-track-inspecti... on the decision to veer toward unmanned inspections that rely upon lidar, gauge measures, crack vibration sensing etc. Personally I veer toward manned patrols with state of the art instrumentation - for the rail I'm familiar with there are things that can happen with ballast that are best picked up by a human, for now.
- hedora 11mo agoThey should already be able to detect line breaks using old technology. They send current pulses down the line to detect stuck switches, since stuck switches can cause collisions. Also, the pulses are conducted through the wheels and axles of any trains, so they can use resistance and/or timing to figure out where the trains are. Having said that, if it was 2020 and you told me that making photorealistic pictures of broken bridges was harder than spoofing the signals I just described, I’d say you were crazy. The idea that a kid could do this would have seen even less plausible (that’s not to say a kid did it, just that they could have). Anyway, since recently-intractable things are now trivial, runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.
- jameslk 11mo ago> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images. > "The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer," a spokesperson said. I don't think this will work the way they think it will work. In fact, I think they just proved they're vulnerable to a type of attack that causes disruption and completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer
- squigz 11mo agoAnyone to whom that information is relevant already knew that this vulnerability has existed for a long time.
- crazygringo 11mo agoTo be clear, you don't need AI for this. You can also just call the railroad and report the bridge as damaged. Hoaxes and pranks and fake threats have been around forever.
- mschuster91 11mo agoThat leaves much more of a paper trail. People routinely are fined and jailed for pulling off such "pranks", partially because "fake threats"/"abuse of emergency response resources" are an exception to many freedom-of-speech laws. A fake photo of a collapsed bridge however won't cross that criminal threshold.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoIf you create a fake photo/video with intent to cause disruption it absolutely crosses the threshold.
- euroderf 11mo agoIntent is a valid legal concept. Certainly there's no way to try "swatting" without crossing that line of intent, but (for example) less-threatening prank phone calls can be in the grey area. I presume there is established legal practice for handling these kinds of things, but for generative images the legal limits won't achieve wide awareness until some teenagers and assorted morons get hauled into court.
- hurturue 11mo agointent is very difficult to prove. "I was just memeing, sir"
- dmurray 11mo agoIf you create one to prank your friend, and he ends up falling for it and sharing it in another group, and it gets to someone who alerts the authorities, without including the context of "this was sent to me by a guy who's a bit of a joker", and railway management's policy is to take all reports seriously rather than verifying their provenance...I find it hard to think anyone in that chain should really be held liable.
- bgwalter 11mo agoThe BBC says the hoaxer should consider the effect on other people. Should Sir Keir, who wants to "turbocharge" "AI", perhaps consider the effect on other people? So far we have almost no positive applications for the IP laundering machines.
- hexbin010 11mo agoEarlier this year: > Vance told world leaders that AI was "an opportunity that the Trump administration will not squander" and said "pro-growth AI policies" should be prioritised over safety. Our PM definitely won't be adjusting his position. He's been told: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8edn0n58gwo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8edn0n58gwo
- renewiltord 11mo agoMuch of the world relies on general well-behavedness. The whole Andon principle doesn’t work if you’ve got asshole employees. With the public you don’t have a choice. You have to stop the trains because otherwise everyone will murder you if it turned out to be true. So better to be defensive.
- lmz 11mo agoWhen the west devolves into a low trust society because of things like this and the relentless importing of people from such, it will lose the advantage of being a high trust society. Equality for all!
- renewiltord 11mo ago[flagged]
- fooker 11mo agoI'd consider places with no school shootings higher trust than those with 300 school shootings every year :)
- lmz 11mo agoSure, go for the cheap shot (heh) at the Americans - but the news article is from the UK.
- matthewmacleod 11mo agoI think we can reliably say that the global West's current lack of trust is nothing other than home-grown.
- jibal 11mo ago"think about the serious impact it could have" They do ... that's why sociopaths do such things.
- informal007 11mo agoCannot image how often this will happen after we are buried under fake contents from AI.
- foxglacier 11mo agoJust realize that people and institutions are adaptable and their processes are not set in stone. We'll find a way through even if you or I can't imagine exactly how right now.
- ileonichwiesz 11mo agoA lot of institutions, even crucial ones that we all depend on to manage important aspects of society, have barely started adapting to this newfangled fad called the internet. Maybe they’ll figure out what to do about generative AI somewhere around 2060.
- ChrisMarshallNY 11mo agoI think we’re just getting started, with fake images and videos. I suspect that people will be killed, because of outrage over fake stuff. Before the Ukraine invasion, some of the folks in Donbas made a fake bomb, complete with corpses from a morgue (with autopsy scars)[0]. That didn’t require any AI at all. We can expect videos of unpopular minorities, doing horrible things, politicians saying stuff they never said, and evidence submitted to trial, that was completely made from whole cloth. It’s gonna suck. [0] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/28/exploiting-cadavers-and-faked-ieds-experts-debunk-staged-pre-war-provocation-in-the-donbas/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/28/exploiting-cadave...
- ineedasername 11mo agoSo far, I see the most concern about this sort of thing from people who came of age around or after Web 2.0 hit, at a time when even a good photoshop wasn’t too hard to place as fake. Those I know who lived through this issue when digital editing really became cheap seem to be more sanguine about it, while the younger generation on the opposite side side is some combination “whatever” or frustrated but accept that yet another of countless weird things has invade a reality that was never quite right to begin with. The folks in between, I’d say about the 20 years from age 20 to 40, are the most annoyed though. The eye of the storm on the way to proving that cyberpunk lacked the required imagination to properly calibrate our sense of when things were going to really get insane.
- soneil 11mo agoIn my family it's the other way around - it's the people that used to tell us not to talk to strangers on the internet, and not to believe everything we see on the internet, who are now doing precisely that.
- oefrha 11mo ago> We can expect videos of unpopular minorities, doing horrible things Expect? You can post a random image of an unpopular minority, add some caption saying they did horrible things, that is not reflected in the image at all, and tons of people will pile on. Don’t even need a fake video.
- mr_windfrog 11mo agoWhat this incident really shows is the growing gap between how easy it is to create a convincing warning and how costly it is to verify what's actually happening. Hoaxes aren't new, but generative tools make fabrication almost free and massively increase the volume. The rail operator didn't do anything wrong. After an earthquake and a realistic-looking image, the only responsible action is to treat it as potentially real and inspect the track. This wasn't catastrophic, but it's a preview of a world where a single person can cheaply trigger high-cost responses. The systems we build will have to adapt, not by ignoring social media reports, but by developing faster, more resilient ways to distinguish signal from noise.
- bncndn0956 11mo agoSir, this is AI prose. Wendy's doesn't allow AI prose.
- mr_windfrog 11mo agoThanks for the heads-up! I actually wrote this based on my own thoughts about the incident, but I understand the concern. I'll make sure to keep my posts in line with the community guidelines.
- foxglacier 11mo agoYou don't need AI for this kind of disruption. People have been making fake bomb threats for years. You just have to say it, either directly to the railway/etc. or publicly enough that somebody else will believe it and forward it to them. The difference might be of intent - if you say you planted a bomb on the bridge, you're probably committing a crime, but if you just post a piece of art without context, it's more plausibly deniable. It's also pretty common in the UK for trains to be delayed just because some passenger accidentally left their bag on the platform. Not even any malicious intent. I was on a train that stopped in a tunnel for that reason once. They're just very vulnerable to any hint of danger.
- array_key_first 11mo ago
- osigurdson 11mo agoFrom 1950 - 2005(ish) there were a small number of sources due to the enormous moat required to become a broadcaster. From 2005 to 2021, you could mostly trust video as the costs of casual fakery were prohibitive. Now that the cost to produce fake videos are near zero, I suspect we will return to a much smaller number of sources (though not as small as in the pre YouTube era).
- bigiain 11mo agoThere will be people who care about trusted and reliably accurate news sources, and at least some of them are willing to pay for it. Think 404 Media. But there are people who don't want their news to be "reliably accurate", but who watch/read news to have their own opinions and prejudices validated no matter how misinformed they are. Think Fox News. But there are way way more people who only consume "news" on algorithmically tweaked social media platforms, where driving "engagement" is the only metric that matters, and "truth" or "accuracy" is not just lower priorities but are completely irrelevant to the platform owners and hence their algorithms. Fake ragebait drives engagement which drives advertising profits.
- soerxpso 11mo agoSuppose that I care about trustworthy and reliably accurate news sources and am willing to pay. How can I distinguish which ones are trustworthy and reliable? No offense to the folks at 404 Media, but I've never met a single one of them, and I have no reason to believe that they wouldn't lie to me for money. You clearly have your own prejudices and biases about which media organizations are honorable and which are not, which you're wrapping up as if it's about a "truthfulness" that you couldn't possibly actually verify.
- WalterBright 11mo agoWe're also seeing a barrage of commercials featuring AI generated animals talking like people. It's getting old.
- jen729w 11mo ago
- deadbabe 11mo agoDon’t trust, only verify.
- hexbin010 11mo agoWhat would that have looked like in this instance?
- nsoqm 11mo agoSomeone inspecting the bridge in person?
- deadbabe 11mo agoExactly
- hexbin010 11mo agoI presume you mean keep running services as normal until someone inspects it in person. Perhaps, if the person receiving the report knew that services ran pretty slowly over it anyway that time of night. But it's basically just a nice idea in theory. The British public doesn't have that kind of apetite for risk. Take a look at responses to existing high profile incidents. We are proud of our approach to safety and safety records (trains, road etc) and I don't see that changing any time soon. Personally, I think we are too risk averse in too many areas. AIUI there is a mandate at Network Rail to take all reports made by the public very seriously, which came off the back of a previous incident. Plus there is of course the huge logistical challenge - the GB rail network is not small.
- human_llm 11mo agoRemember Moab
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agoYou don't need AI to make these hoaxes, pranks have been around forever etc etc.... but as with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. In this case the low barrier to creating the fake media coupled with the pervasiveness of social media networks and their reach (also networks that aren't new), affording the rapid deployment and significant impact by bad actors. The problem is the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it.
- jen729w 11mo agoHow hard could it be — genuine question — for, say, Apple (Nikon, Sony,…) to embed a QR code (optionally) into an image. QR leads you to a page, you upload image to page, hashes are compared, image-from-sensor confirmed. Surely at this point we need provable ‘photography’ for the mass market.
- hurturue 11mo agoyou still need to check the bridge. I could take a real image of the collapsed bridge, modify it somehow with AI, post it, you then say "hey, its not real, look, QR doesnt match, the bridge is safe"
- yjftsjthsd-h 11mo agoWhat system would you create that prevents a camera from being pointed at a screen? Because if you can't block the analog hole, any verification scheme is trivial to bypass.
- conception 11mo agoNone but it makes it more difficult. People could “photoshop” before digital but most didn’t. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, etc.
- yjftsjthsd-h 11mo agoPerhaps, but in this case I'd worry that the workaround is so easy that the only result is people trust the system more and are easier to trick while not actually raising the difficulty.
- ascorbic 11mo agohttps://deepmind.google/models/synthid/ https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
- baden1927 11mo agoFreight transport is cost-effective in terms of delays, approx. 2mn per minute in the three Pacific Railroad Surveys for a trans-contiental railroad by the War Department circa. 1850. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Surveys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Surveys
- ulfw 11mo agoLLM AI has led to job losses (either indirectly for moving investments into AI instead of people) or directly. Generative imagery has and will lead to more bullshit election outcomes, people getting blackmailed, scamed, things like this train stoppage etc etc. The list is endless. Not even getting into how the AI bubble burst will make most of us poor when the huge stock market crash comes, but hey whatever... What good has it brought us (not the billionaire owners of AI)? It made us 'more effective' and oh instead of googling something and actually going to a link reading in detail the result we can now not bother with any of that and just believe whatever the LLM outputs (hallucinations be damned). So I guess that's an upside. (before the AI god bros come: I am talking purely about LLMs and generative imagery and videos, not ML or AI used for research et al)
- pjmlp 11mo ago> LLM AI has led to job losses I can confirm, the trend now in enterprise CMS deployments is to push for AI based translations, and image assets generation, only pinging back into humans for final touches, thus reducing the respective team sizes. Another area are marketing and SEO improvements, where the deal is to get AI based suggestions on those improvements, instead of getting a domain expert. Any commercial CMS will have these AI capabilities front and centre on their website regarding why to chose them.
- frm88 11mo agoI belive you are right and in due time this will lead to people dying needlessly as demonstrated in this article in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/05/ai-deepfakes-of-real-doctors-spreading-health-misinformation-on-social-media https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/05/ai-deepfakes... where in this case it was a scam for a "harmless" medication but serious disruptors could easily up the game. What stuck with me most from that article is that we have currently no means to enforce such things get taken down which prolongs the potential for real damage. And all of that for a little more "efficiency".
- hexbin010 11mo agoIn a extreme safety-first organisation — and the GB railway is exactly that — it's easy to exploit that weakness. It actually had very minimal impact. An hour or two wasn't bad for an organisation which stripped staff to a bare minimum, and for the area. And it's very much the customer's job to work for the railway these days: it's our job to report police matters we are told incessantly with announcements. It's our job to buy the right ticket as there are very few ticket staff and staff with any knowledge these days. It's our job to use third party websites during disruption and to Tweet the railway company for assistance because again there is not enough staff. So Network Rail is not going to come out and say "it's absolutely our job to be aware of all our infrastructure at all times and our defence to this new threat is to bolster staff and CCTV and reduce our reliance on third party reports"
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jimnotgym 11mo ago>"It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days." It is no surprise to me that Network rail are so understaffed that any special event disrupts their work schedules for days. That is what they call 'efficiency' these days. Edit: Aside. During a set of fire service strikes it was a relatively common opinion to say something like, 'of course they have an easy job, they get paid to just sit/lie down at the station'. I used to ask, 'what would you like them to do while waiting in case you need rescuing?'. No answer. I spoke to a fireman and he told me that in response to this kind of nonsense a bunch of pointless busy work was invented for them. When real was privatised in the UK they fired a lot of these 'inefficient' workers. After a string of rain crashes, the government had to renationalise Network Rail (the bit that maintains the infrastructure). Another case where 'efficiency' means harming people for profit.
- danjc 11mo agoThe issue is provenance. We need cameras and phones to digitally sign photos so we can easily verify an unadulterated image. You also want to be able chain signing so that for example a news reporter could take a photo, then the news outlet could attest its authenticity by adding their signature on top. Same principle could be applied to video and text.
- soerxpso 11mo agoSigning something doesn't verify that it's real, it just verifies that you claimed that it was real, which everyone was already aware of. You can either hack a camera, or use an unhacked camera to take a picture of a fake picture.
- zkmon 11mo agoLaw of Buddha: Older tech will have less side effects and more benefits, while modern tech will mostly have side-effects only. Because the older tech came out of need, while modern tech comes out of greed. Modern tech annoys older tech, like birds poking at dinosaurs. Trains enabled economic progress, which gave rise to computers and AI.
- rkachowski 11mo ago> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images. Perhaps Network Rail should have a system of asserting rail integrity that is independent of social media (?!!?) for real, pick up the phone and ask someone (??)
- sd9 11mo agoIf I were on a train and there was even a chance that we were careering towards a collapsed bridge... I would appreciate that train stopping before we find out.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago> or real, pick up the phone and ask someone I mean, they did do that eventually. But if the image was convincing, then stopping the train immediately is the rational choice. Erring on the side of a small delay rather than a train disaster is the right thing to do in this situation.
- Normal_gaussian 11mo ago1 - it's the middle of the night. It takes a while longer to find someone to go and look at the bridge. 2 - integrity checks can tell you that the bridge has definitely failed, but not that it definitely hasn't.
- mcphage 11mo agoI’m not sure what you wanted them to do, that they didn’t do.
- ndsipa_pomu 11mo agoI'm perfectly happy for Network Rail to prioritise customer safety. They get an unsubstantiated report from social media, so they stop services over the affected area until they can get someone to go and check. Picking up the phone wouldn't be much use as there's not teams of safety inspectors just waiting by rail bridges. To my mind, Network Rail is blameless for this.
- 11mo ago
- endofreach 11mo agoI mean what does anyone expect from a future where images like this can be generated by any moron for any place, in thousands of variations, with just a few clicks? And then video? I am surprised headlines like this are only coming out now. I've been saying it for a long time, but people said i am crazy. The web as we know it will be unusable. And a new one will not solve all issues, as we have already made ourselves too dependent on the current web and tech. So the impact on the real world is gonna turn a lot if things upside down. It's gonna be a lot of fun. But sure, let's keep pretending AI can either be nothing but bullshit OR we should only fear losing jobs to robots... i don't get why no one every thinks about the societal impact... it's so obvious, still... i am baffled...
- 627467 11mo ago> "It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days." Im way more concerned of this statement than whatever is reported in the title. How fragile is a society that is unable to make a simple visual confirmation of a statement without having a multiday multi-££ impact?
- roryirvine 11mo agoI think it's reasonable to expect that the staff involved in an emergency callout of this sort will be entitled to Time Off In Lieu, and that that TOIL will cause knock-on effects to staff rostering. Delaying the inspection until working hours would have caused much greater disruption. Having a track inspection team on hand 24x7 to cover all potential routes would incur much higher staffing costs. An on-call system backed by TOIL and accepting the risk of dealing with occasional re-rostering seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
- 627467 11mo agoYou dont need specialized teams of people to testify that the photo on the right[0] is fabricated. Any police officer on duty could do that. You dont need people to say "the bridge is sound" just that the rumours are false. Its like certain societies enjoy the rigidity they are in. But i guess in a country where a "retweet" of the wrong opinion can get you in legal trouble it just easier to say that fabricating and propagating ai slop is also ilegal [0] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/5e92/live/bc1e9fa0-d1fd-11f0-a892-01d657345866.jpg.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/5e92/live/bc1e9...
- roryirvine 11mo agoNetwork Rail deal with dozens of reports of earthworks failures, landslips, vehicle strikes, and other problems affecting bridges and viaducts every day. They have well-tested procedures in place to investigate them. In some locations, and at some times of day, those procedures involve on-call staff. Sure, "just follow the process" is a lot less exciting than coming up with an ad-hoc response - but when you're dealing with safety-critical infrastructure at scale, it makes a lot more sense than cowboying it and hoping for the best.
- squirrel 11mo agoAmazingly, no one seems to have actually checked that this picture was really "circulating on social media". I've been investigating for the past hour or so and can't locate a single public post or reference anywhere other than reposts of the BBC article. Typically, postings that gain traction have many many reposts and though some may be deleted, there's a long tail of reverberation left behind. I can't find that at all here. I wonder if the hoaxer just emailed it to Network Rail directly?
- IAmBroom 11mo agoThat would be a level of hoaxery I would actually applaud.
- insane_dreamer 11mo agoAnother way that AI is literally destroying the Internet. Despite using Claude Code almost daily and finding it a useful tool, on balance I think that AI is a net negative to society.
- Ylpertnodi 11mo ago> Another way that AI is literally destroying the Internet.......on balance I think that AI is a net negative to society. Ai isn't destroying the internet. People are.
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- belenos46 11mo agoRemember Moab