One of the most interesting challenges that journalism –and society in general– has to face is how to distinguish texts and images generated with artificial intelligence (AI) from those created by humans and that reflect reality.
The robotics engineer Kate Darling, one of the world references in this field, explained this summer in La Contra that no matter how human a robot may seem, "at some point you capture something subtle, that worries you, disturbs you" . And she added: "It's almost imperceptible, it makes you cringe, disconcerts and unsettles you." This perception, sometimes unconscious, that something does not add up gives rise to a feeling of rejection and is called “uncanny valley”.
Perhaps that is what the reader Gerardo Contreras detected before the image –real, but too processed– published in the newspaper on August 21 of a meeting between Johan Cruyff and Armand Carabén at El Prat airport 50 years ago, when the legendary player was signed by Barça. "As a daily reader of your newspaper for more than twenty years, I would like to know why La Vanguardia slipped our readers on Monday, August 21, a false photo generated by artificial intelligence without warning and as if it were real," he wrote to me a few days after. Contreras was right that the image had tones and definition (in general but also in the hands and faces, as he well pointed out) typical of AI-generated images.
The newspaper's production team oversees that the photographs published in the print edition have the right quality and tones for the sensitive web printing process, since a photograph that looks perfect on a screen can be very dark or washed out on the paper. the newsprint. In this case, the original had an insufficient resolution for the dimensions in which it was intended to be published and an image processing program was used, but the end result was excessive contrast and even a distortion of certain points that created an aura of unreality. As the engineer Darling would say and some readers detected, there was the "uncanny valley".
In the digital edition, the image has already been replaced by the original and the production team has decided not to use the program that distorted the photograph in this way.
