‘Better and better AI’ could sink myth of the Loch Ness monster

Artificial intelligence could spell the end for one of the world’s biggest mysteries – as experts fear that AI-generated images of the Loch Ness monster could soon be indistinguishable from genuine photographs.

Since The Inverness Courier first ran a story about the Loch Ness monster in 1933, there has been an obsession with the Scottish lake and what may be hidden inside.

Aldie Mackay, manager of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, said that she saw a “beast” in the loch on April 14, 1933, and since then there have been innumerable hoaxes, myriad theories and various scientific studies to try to find the unidentified leviathan of the loch.

Steve Feltham has been living in a van at Loch Ness for more than 30 years and is a full-time Nessie hunter.

He says that a major part of his work is to screen purported sightings of Nessie. Nine in 10, he says, are people who are convinced they have seen the mythical monster but are mistaken.

Five per cent are troublemakers coming to start another hoax, much like Marmaduke Wetherell did in 1933 when he used a hippopotamus ashtray to try to claim a newspaper reward for finding Nessie, and the other five per cent, Mr Feltham says, are unexplained events.

“That’s the interesting stuff. That’s the stuff I’m looking for. I treat it like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” Mr Feltham said.

But exposing the hoaxes, he says, is a crucial part of his role because there needs to be a chance that a photo of Nessie is real and people do not automatically discount it as fake, in order for the legend to persist.

“When I sense that there’s something amiss in a picture, I’m like a dog with a stick,” he said. “I’ve exposed dozens of photographs over the years.”

Hoaxes, Mr Feltham says, pose a threat to the Nessie legend. If a real sighting of Nessie and a sham can not be told apart, then the folklore wanes.

“I do see a possible end to my ability to identify what’s in a picture as a mundane false alarm or something unexplainable,” he warned.

“AI at the moment makes very good pictures but you can still tell it’s an AI image. But this is the dawn of flight for that technology, they are going to get better and better and it’s going to be such that I’m not going to be able to tell whether it’s the real thing or AI.

“I could see a time sometime in the future, depending on how fast the AI technology develops, where I’d be redundant in identifying what’s in the photograph and the only occupation I would be left with would be the main core of what I do, which is staring at the body of water trying to spot something myself.”

Searching for the Loch Ness monster, Mr Feltham said, is “going to become untenable” as the world is not going to be able to know what is real or fake.

Juliana Delaney, chief executive of the new Loch Ness Centre, also thinks AI may pose a problem down the line, and hoaxes are “even easier now than they were in the 1930s”.

“We’ve now got AI and all sorts of interesting things to contend with,” she added.