Right after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot Renee Good in her car in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Wednesday morning, people became internet sleuths to suss out the federal agent’s identity.
In the social media videos of the shooting, ICE agents did not have their masks off, but people online spread images of a bare face. “We need his name,” one viral X post reads, along with an apparent image of an unmasked federal agent’s face.
There was just one big problem — many of these photos of the agent’s face were being altered by artificial intelligence tools.
The ICE agent who shot Good has now been identified by multiple outlets as Jonathan Ross, but in the immediate aftermath, he looked like many different men, thanks to AI images flooding social media that reconstructed what he might look like unmasked.
“AI’s job is to predict the most likely outcome, which will just be the most average outcome,” said Jeremy Carrasco, a video expert who debunks AI videos on social media. “So a lot of [the unmasked agent images] look just like different versions of a generic man without a beard.”
