Australian media has been publishing AI-manipulated Barnaby Joyce images

Major Australian news outlets appear to have unknowingly published AI-manipulated images of Barnaby Joyce, raising questions about how prepared newsrooms are for the technology widespread’s use.

Earlier this month, Daily Mail Australia was the first to publish footage of former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce lying on his back on a footpath in Canberra. The video was widely reported upon by Australian media, prompting a news cycle and an avalanche of social media commentary and memes about the Nationals politician. 

Despite the Daily Mail Australia’s footage being heavily watermarked, many of these articles and posts used a “clean” image that didn’t have the publication’s logo.

It appears that the source for this image was a social media user who used an AI-powered tool to remove the watermark. Blair, who didn’t give his full name for professional reasons, told Crikey that he altered the image using WatermarkRemover.io, a website that says it can remove watermarks using “powerful AI technology with only [a] few clicks”, and manually cleared up some artefacts with Photoshop afterwards. He then posted it to X, formerly Twitter, where it subsequently spread.

Blair provided his original tweet as well as images from throughout the process to Crikey to show its provenance.

A Google reverse image search shows that this version of the image (complete with distinctive remaining visual artefacts) has been published on webpages including Nine’s 2GB, 9NEWS, News Corp Australia’s The Australian, news.com.au and The Daily Telegraph as well as on satirical websites The Chaser and The Shovel.

The Chaser’s Charles Firth confirmed that the site had used an image shared from social media and had no idea it had been manipulated.

“I presume the original, un-AI’d version depicts Barnaby soberly standing up and sipping a glass of sparkling mineral water, does it?” he said in an email.

None of the other publications responded by deadline.

Other than the removal of the watermark, Blair’s Joyce image appears to be identical to the watermarked version. However, as demonstrated by Nine’s manipulation of Victorian state MP Georgie Purcell’s body, even small changes introduced using AI technology can alter the meaning of an image. 

RMIT Senior Lecturer Dr TJ Thomson, who is researching the use of AI-generated images, said that the widespread use of the image by newsrooms was worrying as it could seed doubt in the minds of its audience over the trustworthiness of the publications.

“It makes them ask what else has been done to the image. If a few pixels have been edited here and here, what’s to stop them changing other pixels to change the meaning,” Thomson said in a phone call with Crikey.

While the edits were not made by the newsrooms themselves, he believes newsrooms will need to make big changes to their processes to adapt to AI-generated images.

“At the end of the day, these aren’t technological issues. They’re about people. We’re messy, we lie, we have to account for that,” he said.

Watermarks have a purpose beyond just commercial reasons, Thomson said.

“Think of it in a different context like a Margaret Olley painting with her signature at the bottom. People would be confused if someone edited out her signature. These establish provenance.”