The Wolf That Never Came to the Square

TORREALBA. On Thursday night a photo began to circulate in the village’s WhatsApp groups: a wolf, at night, next to the fountain in the main square, under the bakery sign. “Tonight, in Torrealba. Keep an eye on the children,” said the message. In less than a day it had been forwarded more than 3,000 times.

On Friday morning, the town hall received dozens of calls from worried residents. That same day, Begoña Arrieta, who teaches Spanish language and literature at the secondary school, swapped the lesson she had planned for a fact-checking exercise with her Year 8 students.

The first thing they did was ask an AI chatbot whether the photo was real. It replied that it was “authentic, with 95% probability”. “That’s where we learnt the first lesson,” explains Lucas, one of the students. “A tool can answer you very confidently and still be wrong. What it says isn’t proof: you have to check it.”

So they went down to the square with the photo on a phone. The real fountain has three spouts; the one in the photo has four. The bakery sign says “BAKERY”; the one in the photo says “BAKRY”, with slightly crooked letters. According to the teacher, warped text and details that don’t add up are common in images created with artificial intelligence. What’s more, the account that first posted the photo had been created the day before and had no other posts.

Asked by this newspaper, the biologist Íñigo Salcedo points out that in some areas wolves may come close to villages, especially in winter, “although it’s rare and they almost never get as far as a square”. No resident has seen the animal or found any tracks.

On Friday afternoon, the town hall published a notice: the photo was not taken in Torrealba. Class 8B, for its part, has made a poster with four questions to ask yourself before forwarding anything: Who posted it first? Do the details add up? Does any reliable source report it? And what if it isn’t true?