Storehouse photo misused by masked sellers Last fall, I told you about the rise of deepfakes, seamlessly doctored videos in which artificial intelligence is used to create a fake event, like replacing a person in an existing video with someone else.
Of course, 21st century technology doesn’t mean people will give up on old-fashioned means of deception.
This spring, several groups took a photo from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, cropped it and used it as their own. They even said they were selling what was in the photograph.
Here’s what happened:
You’ll remember that on Jan. 29, church workers loaded boxes with 220,000 N95 respirator masks and other personal protective equipment bound for a children’s hospital in Asia onto pallets at the Utah Bishops’ Central Storehouse on the west side of Salt Lake City. I was there, and I wrote about the donation and the forklift drivers who moved 67 pallets of protective gear onto trucks, which hauled them to the airport for the overseas flight.
The delivery arrived successfully, but within weeks, several groups had misappropriated a photo of the boxes from an official church website, cropped the photo and began to use it to say they were selling those boxes of masks, which was not true. | 