The image of Julian Assange sick in prison is not real, Angela Merkel has never shared ice cream with Barack Obama, and Donald Trump and Putin have not bumped fists. These images, which look real, have been created with GPT-4, the artificial intelligence technology created by ‘Open AI’, which can be used to fabricate images and display them as if they were real.

In this sense, Alicia Troncoso, president of the Spanish Association of Artificial Intelligence, affirms that “if the artificial intelligence technique is well developed, identification can be very difficult by a person whether it was generated by a machine or not”.

They are images that invent the present and even a past that never happened, such as a false earthquake dated 2001 in Oregon. Nothing that appears in these images, which you can see in the main video that accompanies this news, is real. The technology that has served to generate this parallel reality is in the spotlight.

For Miguel Ángel Román, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Institute, “what needs to be regulated is the caseand the point here is to generate fake images by making it look like they’re real.”

The same company that created this technology develop now a product to check if the pictures are real or invented. “I am leaving the world of artificial intelligence to that of security: companies that created viruses created the antivirus themselves,” says Alicia Troncoso.

GPT-4 has obtained 155 points on an IQ test, and a person with more than 130 a person is considered gifted. “All the tools that we know now to detect which images are false as technology advances will become increasingly difficult to distinguish,” warns Miguel Ángel Román.

All this in a sector that barely has legislation. Thus, the European Union is now working on a regulation pioneer that will regulate Artificial Intelligence, although it is still pending application. The president of the Spanish Association of Artificial Intelligence acknowledges in this regard that “it is true that the legal part always lags behind technological development”, although she recalls that “the same thing happened with data protection”.

While the rules of the game are defined, the experts recommend that we be cautious. And it is that none of these images has passed through the filter of truth.