The Lahore Police’s official X account has apparently become more creative. According to netizens, several updates posted by the department on their official X sounded suspiciously polished. It almost looked as if a PR agency had suddenly started posting on behalf of the law-enforcement department. The language was cleaner, sharper and just a little too well structured for routine posting. Which finally culminated in the following fiasco:
This debacle comes just days after Dawn, Pakistan’s most historic and respected newspaper, accidentally published a ChatGPT prompt inside a business news article. The report on auto sales ended with an AI generated line offering to create a snappier front page version. Readers noticed immediately, the clip went viral and Dawn issued an apology acknowledging that AI generated text had mistakenly made it through editorial review. The juxtaposition is almost cinematic. First a major newsroom forgets to delete a chatbot’s instructions, then the city police appear to be using the same chatbot to handle public communication.
For now, the Lahore Police episode sits comfortably in the category of mildly embarrassing, in the same corner as Dawn newspaper sits.
But it begs the question, is it time we question everything we see online? And is there a way organizations can come up with the good old creativity which ran the show for all these years before the advent of AI.