People have flocked to Instagram to trick the social app’s efforts to detect misinformation, with some pretty odd results, it appears.
Facebook-owned Instagram employs a number of different technologies to help combat the misinformation that circulates across its platform each day. One of those technologies is AI. Artificial intelligence.
The problem with AI is that much of the time it isn’t really intelligent. But plenty artificial. That means it can often be exploited in the simplest of ways based on how it is deployed.
Instagram are finding this out.
Firstly, this photo.
This is a man known as Jordi El Nini Polla, or Jordi ENP for short. He is – shall we say – an actor from Spain working exclusively in the adult entertainment sector.
But Jordi ENP is also a viral “joke” meme. And sometimes this means he’s a viral “misinformation” meme. That is to say, there is no shortage of Internet users willing to create fake memes with his image and circulate them far and wide across cyberspace.
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In the past, if some memes are to be believed, Jordi has been an exiled scientist, a hero of the H1N1 epidemic, a Harvard graduate, a coronavirus patient without health insurance, a doctor who passed away after bravely battling to save 10 of his patients from COVID-19 and, more recently, the creator of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Meanwhile, Instagram has adopted a new technology to help it spot misinformation on its platform by automatically flagging images commonly associated with misinformation as “fake news”.
You may be able to see where this is going.
Some Instagram users have figured out that they can take images of Jordi ENP – images that have been used in the past to spread misinformation – and replace the misinformation with entirely true and sound statements. And Instagram is still flagging the content as false.
That, or Instagram has adopted some pretty controversial positions in gender equality, as per below.
Hat-tip to MalwareTech @MalwareTechBlog
Instagram, your AI still needs some work.