By Srijit Das
A photograph showing trees on an island resembling an outline of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's face is circulating widely on social media with a false claim that a French tourist took the image in Gokarna, Karnataka.
BOOM found that the image was created using Stable Diffusion, a generative AI software that is capable of making images with text prompts.
The viral image is circulating with a caption that claims, "This was clicked in Gokarna by a french tourist. A message to the entire planet earth from mother nature. Just zoom and see. Marvelous. The Universal Consciousness has a way to send messages. Sairam." (sic.)
Click here to view the post.
Click here to view the post.
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Fact Check
BOOM ran a reverse image search on the image and found an X (formerly Twitter) user named Madhav Kohli posted the same photo.
Kohli uploaded the photo on September 23, 2023, with a cryptic caption saying, "Do you see him too?"
Click here to view the post.
Responding to another user's inquiry about the application he used for creating the image, Kohli replied 'Stable Diffusion'.
Click here to view the post.
As per Forbes, "Stable Diffusion is a diffusion model, meaning it learns to generate images by gradually removing noise from a very noisy image. This process is called "reverse diffusion," based on math inspired by the way that a physical matter diffuses into a liquid or gas."
We found Madhav Kohli's verified Instagram handle where the same photo was uploaded along with other AI generated images.
Kohli, in his bio, described himself as the "Maker of things".
Click here to view the post.
BOOM reached out to Kohli for further details about the picture. Kohli confirmed that the image was made using generative AI and has not been taken by a French tourist in Karnataka's Gokarna as claimed.
When BOOM asked Kohli about the prompts used to create this image, he said, "I made the image using an AI software called Stable Diffusion. There’s not much to do with prompting in this one since it’s made with a different technology to leverage an image based on a set of prompts that are only concerned with the background and not particularly the subject matter (in this case PM Modi’s portrait)."
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