Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of “Today” host Savannah Guthrie, went missing Jan. 31 from her Arizona home in a disappearance case that’s captured significant national attention. Folks at the FBI say they don’t have any suspects in her potential abduction, but video and still images from a Nest surveillance camera released on Tuesday show a masked figure at Guthrie’s door that morning.
The new images have led to something that happens in virtually every high profile criminal case these days: Social media users are running the images through generative artificial intelligence tools like xAI’s Grok, trying to get a proper looking picture of the suspect without his mask. But that’s just not how AI works.
Better than nothing?
Matt Wallace, a popular distributor of misinformation on X ever since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022, tweeted Tuesday, “Hey @grok remove the kidnapper’s mask and show us what he looks like.”
Wallace shared what Grok generated with the caption, “This is what I got! Better than nothing,” as you can see in the screenshots below.
The resulting image is quite literally nothing of value.
It’s just a random image of a human face that was created by Grok. It has no relation to reality and it is arguably worse than nothing because it will inevitably spread on X as a possible guide for internet sleuths. That’s precisely what happened in the case of the suspect in the Charlie Kirk shooting.
AI sleuthing is common now
After Kirk was killed last year, conspiracy theorists like MAGA influencer Laura Loomer ran security camera images through Grok in an attempt to get a clearer picture of the suspect. But as we explained at the time, AI can’t actually provide more visual information than what’s there. And images shared by Loomer were later used by internet users to cast doubt on the correct identity of the suspect who was eventually arrested in the case, Tyler Robinson.
After all, the AI-enhanced images didn’t look like Robinson because the AI wasn’t providing anything useful. It was simply adding information that wasn’t there, effectively creating a new person’s face which wasn’t grounded in reality. Other conspiracy theorists took the image and compared it to Robinson, insisting there was some grand conspiracy afoot.
The Nancy Guthrie case is sparking an identical rush by social media users to run these new security camera images through AI. And they’re going to be similarly disappointed in the results, assuming we ever see a suspect arrested. The case has been running up against all kind of obstacles and a lack of information, based on the latest reports from mainstream news outlets.
Nancy Guthrie was last seen around 9:45 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 31 after having dinner with local family and was reported missing by her family the following day after she didn’t show up for church. The Guthrie family has received ransom demands that include paying in Bitcoin, according to ABC News, but it’s not at all clear how credible those might be.
One man from Hawthorne, California, identified as 42-year-old Derrick Callella, was arrested after allegedly demanding a ransom despite not kidnapping anybody. And while it seems like Guthrie may have been abducted for ransom, nobody can say that definitively yet.
Kath Patel is crowdsourcing his case
The footage released by the FBI was recorded during the morning of Jan. 31, according to a tweet from FBI Director Kash Patel, and was “recovered from residual data located in backend systems.”
Several news outlets have reported that Guthrie “didn’t have a subscription” to Nest, but it’s not at all clear what Patel means by “backend systems.” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said on-air Tuesday night that it was recovered from “remote servers.”
The FBI’s release of the Nest footage is widely seen as a form of desperation. But obviously the public doesn’t know what may or may not be gathered behind the scenes. And there’s presumably other security cameras in the area that could be checked for evidence, especially as companies like Ring normalize the kind of mass surveillance that we now live under.
Plenty of idiots around
Matthew Wallace isn’t the only person currently trying to run the security camera footage from the Guthrie case through AI. All you need to do is check Patel’s replies on X to see people who are asking Grok for “enhanced” and colorized versions of the images, as well as close ups that are supposed to reveal something new.
One user was indignant at the FBI, writing, “this entire video can be colorized. why hasn’t this been done?”
Some users have also added various flourishes to make the suspect look like their preferred villain, whether they’re Hispanic or Palestinian or any other number of characteristics that may be shared by the “real” criminals in the U.S., depending on your bigotries.
“@grok can you put a keffiyeh on the photos head?” one user wrote Tuesday before Grok dutifully complied.
These are perhaps the dumbest people on the planet. And not just the bigots.
These people have no idea how AI works when it comes to visual information. It’s not some magic tool that can provide you with more information than is currently available. AI is just making things up and guessing. The images it’s creating right now in Patel’s replies are a huge waste of time and resources. But X has become a cesspool of idiots and Nazi freaks, so you’re going to see a lot of that right now.
Fox News is just as dumb
At the same time, it’s tough to be too hard on amateur social media sleuths. Because Fox News seems to be just as pathetic in its discussion of the case. Jesse Watters, a Fox host who was famously uninvited to Thanksgiving by his own mother for being a political extremist, rambled on and on Tuesday with his expert analysis.
“So you look at him and he doesn’t look like a professional. He looks relaxed, but not very determined. He looks like he’s moving very slowly. Maybe he’s familiar with the house, but it doesn’t look like this guy’s done this before,” Watters said on TV Tuesday.
Watters went on to say that he seems “haphazard” and “looks kind of maybe like a local, not some guy that flew in and had targeted Nancy Guthrie from out of town.” To be clear, Watters has no expertise to offer in this case, but that didn’t stop him from wildly speculating for several minutes.
Yes, social media has turned everyone into experts. But when mainstream TV channels are filled with people who are just as stupid, you just have to accept that this is the world we live in now.
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