This Thursday's Discord Stage Talk is with Aram Shabanian from the New Lines Institute. We'll be discussing how to monitor live video feeds for research purposes, with the use of free tools. Join the live audience via this link: https://discord.gg/bmDSDsywXE?event=1143227943737376788
There seems to be many newsrooms and individual researchers stepping into the world of open-source research at the moment. Join us later today for a discussion on a new skill, how to monitor live video feeds! https://discord.gg/bmDSDsywXE?event=1143227943737376788
The teams at C4ADS and Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) have been working with Bellingcat discord members to map out incidences of violence in Sudan in a new data collection found here: https://sudanshahid.org/
If you are interested in joining in with discussions that lead to work like this, join our discord server. We've just reached 20,000 members! https://discord.gg/bellingcat
This month marks 9 years of Bellingcat. Over the years the team has uncovered international crimes and built tools to empower others. We’ve seen the adoption of open-source research skill sets in major newsrooms around the world. Here are some of our team’s proudest moments…
Bellingcat put two AI bots to the test, BING’s AI tool and Google’s new BARD. We provided them with identical images and the name of the city featured and date each image was taken.
When given an image of recognisable landmark Edmonton City Hall, the BING AI appeared to focus on the skyscrapers in the background and the water, wrongfully identifying it as a bridge in the same city.
When provided with this second prompt, the BING’s AI correctly identified the location: “This is not a bridge. The image appears to have been taken on a public square, with the building with a pyramid-shaped roof in the background.”
While many AIs can generate images, most cannot analyse them and are therefore useless for the purposes of direct geolocation. BING and BARD (Google’s new AI) are different and can analyse images.
Bellingcat observed how the BING AI seemed to mimic the process of an open-source researcher in geolocating, noting key structures in the images, but failed to identify images successfully on its own.
We also tested Google’s new chat bot ‘BARD’ with an identical set of images. This tool required less prompts on average, and provided Dennis Kovtun with a list of landmarks to select from in a process of elimination.
However the tool still failed to geolocate without significant prompting. It misplaced landmarks, placing them near parks far away and in fictitious surroundings of a fake space and science centre.
There was evidence of what researchers call ‘AI hallucinations’ from both tools. In one instance, the BING AI provided details that were impossible to find without EXIF data, that had already been scrubbed from the image provided. It had conjured up false camera model and exposure settings, a time the image was taken and that it had the flash off. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/technology/ai-chatbots-hallucinations.html
What are the best tools for fighting disinformation? As Eliot Higgins writes in Schweizer Monat, teaching young people the value of critical thinking can go a long way.
Bellingcat is an independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists brought together by a passion for open source research. Want to support our charity? http://bellingcat.com/donate/Buy our book "We Are Bellingcat" here: http://bit.ly/2EP09ENOur award-winning podcast series: http://apple.co/36LJURI