IF THE Internet were a neighbourhood, 2023 would be the year in which it became a lot less safe to walk around at night. Its alleys have long been cul-de-sacs of spam posts. Affiliate marketing links already lurk on every corner. Now, with artificial intelligence (AI) content appearing where it has no business being, there is something strange in the neighbourhood. And it’s not clear who you’re gonna call.

Earlier this year, an AI-generated selfie of Tiananmen Square’s “tank man” became Google Image’s first result for the search term “tank man”. The actual protestor who faced down a column of tanks in Beijing remains unidentified and would’ve found selfies a baffling proposition in 1989. Google has since removed those images from search results.

More recently, deepfake videos of deceased Israel-Hamas war victims have appeared on TikTok, their digital resurrections saying and doing things that they are incapable of objecting or consenting to. These videos, which violate TikTok’s policies, were removed after the platform was alerted by the media.