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Wolves are considered extinct in South Korea, but one city that’s home to 1.5 million people has been put on high alert after one of those animals managed to escape from a zoo. Schools have been shut down as hundreds of people have been dispatched to try to track down the animal, but officials say the search has been hampered by a flood of tips that can be traced back to artificial intelligence.
South Korea was once one of the many countries with a sizeable population of wolves in the wild, but hunting caused it to slowly but surely shrink before the grey variety of the species was declared extinct within its borders in the 1990s.
As a result, the only way to get a look at one of those animals is to head to one of the zoos that boast a breeding program with the aim of reintroducing them back into their natural habitat, which includes the one inside O-World, an amusement park located in Daejeon.
However, that city has been gripped by fear for the past couple of days courtesy of Neukgu, the wolf that managed to escape its enclosure before disappearing on Wednesday. The development led to the formation of a sizeable search party, which has been forced to grapple with the most recent example of A.I.’s potential to do more harm than good.
Fake tips linked to artificial intelligence have interfered with the hunt for a wolf that escaped from a zoo in South Korea
According to The Korea Times, Neukgu, a two-year-old male that weighs around 65 pounds, was nowhere to be found when zookeepers arrived at his enclosure on Wednesday morning, and they reviewed surveillance footage that showed he had managed to burrow underneath the habitat before escaping.
It was initially believed he was still within the confines of O-World, and dozens of firefighters, 116 police officers, and around 100 zoo employees were tapped to conduct a search. However, he’s managed to elude them as of Friday morning, and The Guardian reports schools in the city were shut down as a precautionary measure.
The search party has also deployed drones with heat-detecting cameras as the hunt has escalated, and according to Chosun Daily, A.I.-generated images have thrown a wrench into the situation as it continues to unfold.
Officials say they have received more than 100 tips concerning alleged sightings of Neukgu but said most have been “mistaken reports or based on fake photos.”
Artificial intelligence was responsible for one image that sparked a false alarm that led to mass text being sent out warning of the wolf’s presence near a certain intersection, while another led to firefighters spending an hour conducting an ultimately pointless search in another city to the north.
Neukgu remains on the lam of this writing, and here’s to hoping he doesn’t suffer the same fate as the puma that was shot and killed after it escaped O-World in 2018.