Sep 28, 2026Unverified
Purportedly AI-Generated Image Reportedly Prompted Police Alert and Search for Nonexistent Venomous Viper in Santa Ana, California
AI loose in the worldMisinformationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
Santa Ana, California, police issued a public warning and searched for a reportedly sighted Gaboon viper after a resident provided an image as evidence. Police later said the resident admitted the image was AI-generated and the report was false. Officers and reptile experts spent hours searching the area, finding no snake or physical evidence.
What this means for youA fake AI picture can send police and experts searching for a danger that does not exist, wasting public time and money. Officials may need to check images more carefully before acting on them.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1718
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 1930. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify