German police have issued a warning over an online scam involving female AI-generated cops.
Hamburg police said there had been a surge in social media profiles displaying deepfakes of attractive women wearing police uniforms.
The accounts, the police force said, were being used to lure men on social media to click onto paid websites to see more of the realistic images of the AI-generated female cops.
‘We are receiving increasing reports of allegedly AI-generated social media profiles that supposedly depict female colleagues of the Hamburg police’, the police force said in a statement.
Police spokesman Florian Abbenseth added: ‘Such profiles damage the reputation of the police, which is why we are taking decisive action against them’.
The AI-generated images show young and attractive looking women posing in tight-fitting police uniforms.
In one photo, a blonde woman appears to have her jacket zipped down, exposing some cleavage.
Another picture appears to show a woman wearing a tight uniform while a man seemingly takes a photo of her rear. It is unclear if the man in the image is real or AI-generated.
A third image shows an AI-generated cop kneeling on the floor and posing for a mirror selfie.
Hamburg police affirmed that the force does not operate any private Instagram accounts for their officers and announced that legal action against the AI content is already being considered.
The police force also urged Instagram users to report the fake social media profiles.
The use of deepfakes, such as AI-generated images and videos that convincingly impersonates real people have been posing mounting risks for companies and organisation in recent years.
Earlier this year, the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union urged companies to use advanced tools to detect and stamp out misinformation and deepfake content to help counter financial fraud.
The ITU called for robust standards to combat manipulated multimedia and recommended that content distributors such as social media platforms use digital verification tools to authenticate images and videos before sharing.
‘Trust in social media has dropped significantly because people don’t know what’s true and what’s fake,’ Bilel Jamoussi, Chief of the Study Groups Department at the ITU’s Standardization Bureau, noted.
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Combating deepfakes was a top challenge due to Generative AI’s ability to fabricate realistic multimedia, he said.
Leonard Rosenthol of Adobe, a digital editing software leader that has been addressing deepfakes since 2019, underscored the importance of establishing the provenance of digital content to help users assess its trustworthiness.
‘We need more of the places where users consume their content to show this information…When you are scrolling through your feeds you want to know: ‘can I trust this image, this video…’ Rosenthol said.
