By Swasti Chatterjee
An AI-generated image of rioters walking through charred remains in a street with the Eiffel Tower seen in the background is circulating on social media with false claims that it shows apocalyptic scenes in Paris amidst the ongoing unrest.
BOOM was able to confirm that the image has been created using generative-AI software and is not a recent visual from the area near Eiffel Tower in Paris.
France has witnessed sporadic unrest after Nahel M, a 17 year old boy of Algerian descent, was shot dead by a police personnel at a traffic stop on June 27. Nahel was driving a rental car and refused to stop, when he was shot at. According to reports President Emmanuel Macron flooded the streets with police personnel in an effort to contain the rioters and has urged parents to keep their young ones at home.
The image has been tweeted by several handles with captions stating that it shows the current situation in Paris.
The photograph was also tweeted by a handle called @njohncamm alias Narendra Vikramaditya Yadav who misappropriated the name of Professor John Camm - a well-known cardiologist from the United Kingdom. BOOM was able to verify that the handle is of Yadav, a man with an opaque past, who claimed that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath could contain the riots in France in 24 hours. Read BOOM's Fact Check here.
Click here for an archive of the tweet.
The image is circulating on Twitter as a real photo from France. Click here, here and here for archives of the tweets.
BOOM also received the image on its helpline number for verification.
Fact Check
BOOM ran a reverse image search on the photograph but was unable to find any matches on it from before July 2023.
We then ran the image through several tools that can detect AI-generated content including Illuminarty, Optic AI Or Not, Hive Moderation and Hugging Face - the results reflected that the content was most likely to be generated by AI.
According to Hive Moderation, the image is 99.8 % AI generated.
Upon observing the image closely, BOOM was able to find a couple of glaring discrepancies in it. The image does not contain the sharpness and most of the human figures blur into the background.
The charred objects also appear to be blurred and people can be seen standing bizarrely in the burning fire.
The human figure in the foreground appears to be distorted and blurred.
Another human figure in the foreground can be seen with three legs. These anomalies in the human anatomy are generally observed in photos made with generative AI tools.
Additionally, the human figures in the crowd appear to be blurred, and hazy and merge with the background in an abnormal way strongly indicating that the photo was created with generative AI.
