Fact Check: Viral Photo Showing Putin’s Arrest is AI-Generated

New Delhi (Vishvas News): Following the recent victory of President Vladimir Putin in the election, a picture has started going viral on social media alleging Putin’s arrest.

Vishvas News investigated the viral picture and found the claim to be false. The viral picture has been created using AI tools.

What’s Viral?

A user submitted the post to Vishvas News’ tipline number (+91 95992 99372) on March 16, seeking verification of the image showing Putin surrounded by policemen, suggesting his arrest.

Investigation:

To start our investigation, we searched with keywords but found no reports of Putin’s arrest.

According to a report published on Jagran.com on March 18, Putin secured 87.97% of the votes, winning the election and extending his presidency until 2030.

After this, we scrutinized the viral picture and we found several anomalies. We noticed the policeman in the image had six fingers on his hand. Also both the policemen in the image had identical facial features.

Subsequently, we submitted the image to Hugging Face, an AI detection platform, which rated it as 97% AI-generated.

We contacted AI expert Azahar Machwe on this who confirmed that the image was AI-generated.

How You Can Verify AI-Generated Content:

1. Zoom in: Many photos generated by AI appear real at first glance. So our first suggestion is to look at the picture carefully. To do this, find a photo in the highest possible resolution and then zoom in. Enlarging an image can reveal anomalies and errors that are not visible at first glance.

2. Find the source of the image: If you’re unsure whether a photo is real or created by AI, try to find its source. You can also know a lot about the picture by reading the comments made by other users below the post. Or you can do a reverse image search. To do this, upload the image to a tool like Google Image Reverse Search, TinEye or Yandex and you can find the original source of the image. You can also find sources using Google Lens.

3. Pay attention to body proportions: Pay attention to whether the body proportions of the people depicted are correct. For example, look carefully at the proportions of the hand, legs, and fingers of the person in the photo. The proportions of these organs are often distorted in AI-generated images. Sometimes the number of fingers may also fluctuate.

4) Excessive perfection: It is generally seen that AI-generated photos look a little too smooth. In such a situation, it is important to check carefully whether the picture looks unnaturally flawless. For example, look carefully at the crowd seen in the picture, and look carefully at the road and the surrounding environment.