ZDF broadcasts artificially generated recordings of an alleged police operation in the USA without making this known. There is probably more sloppiness behind this than bad intentions.
At a time when public broadcasting is increasingly being questioned in Germany, ZDF has provided opponents of license-financed media with welcome ammunition: on Sunday evening, “Heute-Journal”, one of the Mainz institution’s flagship programs, showed footage generated by artificial intelligence (AI) without making this visible to viewers.
In a report by a USA correspondent, it was seen how officers from the American immigration police ICE took away a mother and her children. A watermark with the source “Sora” could be seen on the edge of the image; Sora is the AI developed by OpenAI that produces deceptively realistic images and videos.
However, ZDF did not declare the sequence as an AI video. The post also showed a teenager who was allegedly picked up from school by ICE officers. While this footage was real, it actually showed a 10-year-old suspect being taken away in Florida in 2022 following threats of a shooting spree.