Icelandic Police Vow to Stop Using AI-Generated Imagery

A police force in Iceland shared this AI-generated picture promoting helmet safety.

Police in Iceland have fallen foul of the apparent universal unpopularity of AI images after one force vowed to stop using the computer-generated pictures.

Police from Suðurnes, the southern peninsula of Iceland a region close to the capital Reykjavík, shared an image to Facebook of a smiling officer putting a helmet on a kid while apparently attending an elementary school in a post promoting bicycle safety.

While some local Icelandics didn’t realize the picture was AI-generated, others called foul when they noticed incongruous details like the officer carrying a holster and gun — something that Icelandic police do not carry.

While the cop in the photo has “Lögreglan” written on his chest (police in Icelandic), he is wearing a non-traditional Icelandic police uniform. Viewers also noticed that some of the children have one too many fingers on their hands.

According to RÚV, a local online news service, the police chief in Suðurnes, Úlfar Lúðvíksson, has said that the AI image posted to the Facebook page was an oversight by a police employee

“From now on, images of Icelandic police officers will be used, we will not rely on artificial intelligence in this regard,” says Lúðvíksson.

A text addendum has now been added to the original Facebook post, computer-translated from Icelandic it reads “The image is drawn with the help of artificial intelligence. The uniform is therefore not what it really is.”

There has been much debate surrounding the labeling of AI-generated images. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, botched a rollout of its “Made with AI” labels after photographers quickly began pointing out that the tag was being attached even when the photo had only undergone a minor tweak — undermining the photo’s credibility.

It prompted Facebook’s stablemate Instagram to announce it would be adjusting the “AI info” label to appear less penalizing to photographers who use an AI feature in Lightroom or Photoshop to adjust a real photo.

But Meta still hasn’t got the hang of labeling AI images as it still flags minor adjustments made to photos but misses images that are entirely AI-generated. It’s not clear which AI image generator the Icelandic police used but whichever one it was, the picture got past Meta’s AI detectors.

Image credits: Lögreglan á Suðurnesjum