Seeing Is No Longer Believing: Frontier Image Generation Models, Synthetic Visual Evidence, and Real-World Risk
Image generation systems can produce plausible photographs, readable documents, and consistent depictions of people and places. When these artifacts are presented as records of real events, they can influence decisions in news, finance, identity verification, medicine, and law. This narrative review examines selected public model documentation, incident reports, research, and governance sources available through 1 October 2026, with English and Chinese community material providing illustrative context. We distinguish vendor capability claims, documented incidents, experimental findings, and prospective harm pathways. The analysis connects realism, text rendering, reference consistency, ed...
| Authors | Shuai Wu, Xue Li, Zhijun Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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