JACKSON, Mo. (KFVS) – The countdown is on for one of the Heartland’s favorite events.

Jackson Homecomers starts in one week.

The annual event runs from Tuesday, July 22 through Saturday, July 26.

There will be rides, music, food, and plenty of other ways to make memories.

It’s the 117th year for Homecomers – and people say it’s a nostalgic event that keeps them coming back year after year.

But there is something new about Homecomers this year, something organizers and community members weren’t expecting, a bit of a controversy.

A lighthearted art contest sparked a bigger conversation about the use of artificial intelligence.

It all started with a Facebook post on the Jackson Homecomers page, a callout to local artists to create the poster for this year’s event.

“It’s obviously easier to keep it in house and design it ourselves and print it and move on,” Kaci Hubbard said.

Hubbard is the executive director at Uptown Jackson.

She, along with Event Coordinator Jess Girard, are helping the American Legion Post 158 with some aspects of this year’s event.

“We decided we could help them with their Facebook page and then also the poster,” Hubbard said.

Instead of designing the poster themselves, they wanted to engage the community with a contest.

“We thought it was a great opportunity, maybe for some local artist to be involved with a piece they could potentially put in their portfolio,” Hubbard explained.

“It gets people involved too, makes them feel involved in Homecomers, like ‘hey I did that’,” Girard added.

The contest did not turn out how they expected.

“We had 5 total submissions,” Girard said. “I mean, obviously, a little disappointed we didn’t get more.”

They received two hand-drawn entries and three entries created digitally. And once it was time for the community to vote on the three finalists, the comment section started lighting up.

Commenters quickly pointed out that all three looked like they were made using artificial intelligence.

“Yes, there were a few that were and there were a few that were not,” Girard said.

We took a closer look at this in our newsroom. Our Producer Emma Kratky, an AI enthusiast, showed me how to check.

“All you have to do is click check image and then upload,” Kratky explained.

The AI detector we used, Sight Engine, shows the winning entry is 99% likely to be AI-generated.

Back in Jackson, though, Girard says it’s not.

“The winner was disappointed, obviously, because they were saying theirs was AI-generated, theirs was not,” Girard explained. “It was not made by AI, they did a lot of photoshop work, they ran it through AI just to smooth out the lines and that made a few things look a little messed up.”

But is the technology used to detect AI growing and progressing as quickly as the AI software itself? AI experts say no.

I went to Three Rivers College in Poplar Bluff to ask how reliable those AI detectors really are.

“AI can create a lot faster than we’re able to detect it,” Dustin Midyett said.

Midyett is Three Rivers’ Data Security Officer. He says AI is so advanced and there are so many tricks to humanize it, you could write something yourself and an AI detector would probably still tell you it’s artificial.

“You can look at the new Google video creators, where you can’t tell if it’s fake or not,” Midyett said. “A year ago, they couldn’t produce a video that didn’t break or fall apart or look like a cartoon.”

That’s the part that Midyett says can get scary, identifying what is real and what is not.

Midyett and Three Rivers Chief Technology Officer Steve Atwood showed me one of the most worrying ways it’s currently being used. They used AI Software on their phones to show how easily it can create a fake phone call.

It’s just a simple use of AI, but it’s gotten so advanced, it can be used to fake anyone’s voice.

“One of the things I’ve told my grandparents is if you get a call and it sounds like me and I’m asking for money or something, hang up and call me back,” Midyett said.

Even if you have not gotten one of those calls, or if you’ve never logged on to Chat GPT to try it out, you’re probably interacting with AI frequently without realizing it.

“You can go on Facebook right now and see everything that someone’s sharing is just generated AI stuff and people are just reacting to it and taking it as news,” Midyett said.

When your phone rings and says spam risk, Artificial Intelligence is detecting that spam. iPhone users, it’s sorting your photos based on who is in them. AI is recognizing your friends and putting them in their own albums. Typing a text or an email and your device is suggesting the next words? AI is recommending what it thinks you’re going to say next.

“Chatbots and stuff on websites are AI and they wouldn’t know it, they think they’re talking to a representative, they’re not,” Midyett explained.

Back to pictures, if you want to know just how easy it would be to create a poster using AI for something, like Jackson Homecomers, we did it.

“Upload a photo of Jackson Courthouse, just so it kind of gives it an idea of what we want to create,” Kratky explained.

We used the winning poster as a reference and asked Chat GPT to use the courthouse and create the poster with a cotton candy stand, Ferris wheels, and laughing children.

In less than 3 minutes, it created two images. When you put them next to the winning entry from the Jackson Homecomers contest, you can see the similarities, which is what caused a lot of uproar in the comments.

“From the comments, you can read a lot of people were upset it was AI and there weren’t more artists’ submissions,” Girard said. “But we have a deadline, we have rules for the contest, and we have to use what we’ve got.”

The moral of the story is AI is here and it’s not going anywhere, so whether it interests you or scares you, technology leaders say it’s something you should look into.

“I would also encourage them to explore it, there are a lot of free things you can do, Chat GPT, Google offers it, Microsoft offers it, go out and experiment with it, see what it can do,” Midyett said.

Both Girard and Hubbard say they want to do the poster contest again for next year’s Homecomers, maybe with the stipulation AI is not allowed.

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