Two Malaysians separated by 900 miles are both taking credit for a synthetic image of Gaza that became the most viral photo ever created by AI, underscoring the complexities of authorship and ownership in an increasingly overcrowded online landscape. content generated by artificial intelligence.
The story behind the “all eyes on Rafah” graphic, which has been shared nearly 50 million times on Instagram and other platforms, likely began on the northern tip of Southeast Asia’s Borneo island.
There, in February, Zila Abka was at home playing with Microsoft’s Image Creator AI tool.
Abka is a 39-year-old science teacher and AI art hobbyist. She is also a pro-Palestinian activist. She wanted to make a piece of political art depicting those sheltering in camps in the Gaza city of Rafah.
After the phrase “all eyes on Rafah” began to go viral, Abka said she wrote a request to the AI tool to create an image that would have the phrase written by white tents amid dense rows of other camps. tents. The words had become a rallying cry after a representative of the World Health Organization used them to draw attention to the situation in the region where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have fled.
When Microsoft’s Image Creator outputs a graphic, Abka puts two watermarks on it: One that indicates it was created by AI; another says she was the creator.
She liked it. So she shared a post on February 14 in her own language – Malay – in the Facebook group Prompters Malaya, a gathering place of about 250,000 mostly Malaysians who share AI-generated art, sometimes about the war in Gaza.
“I wanted to spread the word and highlight the issue and hope that everyone would do whatever they could to show solidarity with the people of Gaza right now,” Abka told NPR.
Abka has not previously spoken about the realization of the image.
Abka: ‘I think this is mine’, but the watermarks are gone
From there, she basically forgot about it — until last week, when she saw a very similar image on Instagram, going viral after an Israeli attack on the city that killed dozens and sparked worldwide condemnation.
But the image changed. Her watermarks were gone. And the image was expanded to include snow-capped mountains looming over the canopies, an almost surreal touch, an AI riff on Gaza’s Middle Eastern landscape.
Zila Abka / Microsoft Image Creator
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Microsoft Image Creator
At first, she was offended that someone had scrubbed her image and removed her name. Additionally, she was initially alarmed that the “AI-generated” disclaimer was missing just as tens of millions of people were resharing it online.
She zoomed in to examine every letter and corner of the viral image. She concluded that it must be hers.
“Everything about the structure of the words and the arrangement of the ‘umbrellas’ is the same except for the extended part,” she said. “When I saw it, I thought, yeah, I think that’s mine.”
But her annoyance at not getting credit quickly dissipated.
“I don’t think any AI-generated image fully belongs to anyone,” Abka said.
Indeed, the US Copyright Office has repeatedly denied copyright protection to AI-generated images as they lack human authorship, placing AI images in a legal gray area.
It was, however, Abka’s unique drive that invoked the image. She said that must be worth something, although galvanizing support for Gaza was always her main drive.
“If the goal is to spread awareness,” Abka said of the version of the image that went viral, “then I think I should thank that person.”
The person behind the account ‘Shahv4012’
/ Amirul Shah
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Amirul Shah
That person is Amirul Shah, known as Shahv4012 on Instagram. He is also Malaysian.
The two do not know each other nor have they ever communicated.
Abka believes he took her image, edited it and created an Instagram “template” that has since gone viral on social media, amassing nearly 50 million shares on Instagram and millions more on other social media platforms. .
Abka thinks Shah cropped her image right above her watermarks, then edited it with a tool that uses AI to expand and re-imagine a photo’s background. She believes this because she tried it herself in her AI rendering and got results remarkably similar to the viral image.
Shah’s image has his watermark on it with his Instagram account tag dedicated to his photo, @chaa.my_, giving the impression that this was all his original venture.
Image created by Amirul Shah / AI
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AI generated image
When Shah was contacted for an interview, he denied copying Abka’s creation. Instead, he shared a different version of events.
Shah, a 21-year-old college student in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, hasn’t talked about his process before.
A photography enthusiast, Shah, says he’s been playing around with an AI image generator lately. He thinks he used Microsoft Image Creator, the same service Abka used, but he claims he doesn’t remember.
When he added it to an Instagram “template,” it ricocheted around the world, as influencers and celebrities like Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid amplified it to their millions of followers.
The image looks uncannily like Abka’s, but he claims he hadn’t even seen Abka’s before making his own.
However, the size of the words, the placement of each letter, and the AI-generated tent clusters next to the phrase are identical. But Shah’s version is portrayed from a higher aerial view, with deeper and longer shadows cast by the snowy mountains.
He said he was trying out all kinds of AI images related to Gaza as a form of activism, not trying for virality.
“My goal was not for popularity,” Shah told NPR. “I wanted to support justice for all the Palestinians who are there.”
Shah says AI images spread faster
Technologists say generating the same exact AI image twice is extremely unlikely.
In dozens of attempts to recreate the image using Microsoft’s Image Creator, NPR was unable to get the tool to create an image that came close to going viral. Most of the time, the tool struggled to spell “All eyes on Rafah” correctly, a limitation of many AI image generators, which tend to depict misspelled or distorted words in some way.
NPR / Microsoft Image Creator
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Microsoft Image Creator
Shah, who regularly shares posts on social media highlighting the plight of Palestinians, said he has noticed that real photos and videos of the war tend to have limited reach on Instagram.
“AI photography can spread faster in a short time,” he said. Shah says another problem is that he has had graphic images of the war removed from Instagram for violating the platform’s policies. He said he is aware that repeated violations could mean “users could be banned”, he said.
Felix Simon, a researcher at the University of Oxford who studies the impact of AI on public discourse, said the image created by artificial intelligence fueled its virality much less than other factors.
“The simplicity of the slogan, the symbolism at work, the time and political context, and the fact that it was shared by celebrities,” Simon said, adding that “the lack of graphic content makes it less likely to be taken down, which also helps. ”
It’s a concern echoed by other activists, who have claimed that graphic images showing the atrocities of the war in Gaza could be removed from platforms, or suppressed by social media algorithms.
Some commentators criticized the meme for portraying a sanitized version of war that turns the human horrors on the ground in Gaza into an easily shareable image of AI.
Both Abka and Shah reject this idea, saying that AI images can be a useful way to get people’s attention and get them involved in some way with the fight.
However, there is no agreement among them as to who created the viral image that has sparked worldwide debate about the authenticity of online activism and renewed attention on an internet increasingly filled with realistic depictions of AI.
When pressed on Instagram direct messages for a response to Abka’s claim that her image was copied, Shah blocked an NPR reporter.
Copyright 2024 NPR
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