People Are Using AI to Falsely Identify the Federal Agent Who Shot Renee Good

Minneapolis: In the hours after a masked federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, many people on social media started sharing altered images. They wrongly claimed these pictures showed the real identity of the officer who shot her. Renee Good was a 37-year-old woman, and the shooting happened early on a Wednesday morning.

Videos from the scene show two masked federal agents approaching a parked SUV. One agent tried to ask the driver to get out. When the driver reversed, a third masked agent pulled out a gun and shot, killing Good. Although social media showed videos right after the incident, they did not show any of the agents without masks.

Soon after, AI-altered images of an unmasked officer began to pop up online. These images seem to come from real video footage but have been changed by AI to create a new face. WIRED looked at many of these images shared on popular platforms like X, Facebook, and Instagram. Some posts, like one from Claude Taylor, showed an AI-generated image and asked for the officer’s name, reaching over 1.2 million views.

In another post on Threads, someone named “Influencer_Queeen” shared an altered image and hinted at finding the officer’s address, which got almost 3,500 likes. Hany Farid, a professor at UC-Berkeley who studies AI, said these AI images often miss details and cannot accurately show a person’s real face.

Some people even falsely named the officer involved and connected them to real individuals on social media. WIRED confirmed that some of these names, like Steve Grove, do not link to anyone in ICE. The Minnesota Star Tribune stated that their publisher, Grove, had no ties to the incident.

This misuse of AI is not new. A similar issue happened last September after a shooting, where altered images of a suspect were widely shared but looked nothing like the real person arrested.