Police have admitted using AI to sharpen a photo of a stolen guitar, after the image sparked confusion over the instrument’s true value.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, a photograph was posted to the North Shore, Rodney and West Auckland Police Facebook page, showing an officer and three workers at a music store holding a guitar which had apparently been recently recovered after being stolen more than three years ago.<\/p>\n
The post claimed the guitar was a Fender electric valued at $4299, but in the image it appeared to be a Squier J Bass – which retailed at a much lower price.<\/p>\n
Police had been alerted to a guitar with a matching serial number to the stolen guitar, listed on TradeMe in May. They were able to trace it back to the original person who took it.<\/p>\n
But members of the public noticed the bass in the image posted was nowhere near the value of $4299, with one person commenting: “$4k for a Squier Bass… I’ve got a bridge I can sell you, real cheap”.<\/p>\n
“That’s a Squire only worth $600,” commented another.<\/p>\n
When RNZ called the Takapuna store, the manager said the guitar that had been stolen was a Fender Jazz American Bass, and the police had used AI to alter the photo.<\/p>\n
He said when he asked the police what happened, he was told the bass looked “too blurry” so they had used AI to try and make it look better – and it had added the Squier logo.<\/p>\n
The manager said the guitar was in pretty good condition and now it had been returned would be re-sold, but at a much lower price.<\/p>\n
After RNZ sent questions to police about the photograph, it was deleted from their social media.<\/p>\n
According to police’s acceptable use of generative AI policy, when using a genAI tool, police staff were meant to label the outputs as being AI generated, referencing the name of the tool, unless there was a clear operational reason to withhold the information.<\/p>\n
“The label can vary to reflect the level of involvement of the genAI tool and the human,” it said.<\/p>\n
The policy went on to say it was important to be transparent about the use of generative AI to “help preserve the trust between the person writing\/developing content and the audience”.<\/p>\n
In a statement to RNZ, police said the photograph was “genuine” but AI had been used.<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, a staff member used AI to enhance the focus of the photo.<\/p>\n
“This goes against police processes and should not have happened. The post has been removed.”<\/p>\n
RNZ has asked for further clarification as to the extent of AI used as well as a copy of the original image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Police have admitted using AI to sharpen a photo of a stolen guitar, after the image sparked confusion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-603032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}