Several Indian news outlets including News18 Hindi and Indiatimes ran an AI-generated black and white photo claiming to show a real photo of a young Ratan Tata cycling in the city.
BOOM found that the viral photo is AI-generated and has several telltale signs of being synthetic.
The viral photo has been picked after former Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata passed away on October 9, 2024, at Mumbai's Breach Candy Hospital at the age of 86. The final rites of Tata, were performed with full state honours on October 10.
Indiatimes, News18 Hindi and MenXP Hindi, all published the viral photo in their news articles that had a collection of other iconic photos of Tata over the years.
FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the viral black and white photo of a young man riding his bicycle is AI-generated and created using an AI tool.
Taking a hint from the picture credit in the Indiatimes article we found that the same photo was previously posted by a Pakistani Instagram user - @adillahorei on January 5, 2024.
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Several Anomalies In The Image
In this version of the photo also we can several signs that it is AI-generared like the faces of people in the background are blurred similarly the details of the monuments in the background are not clearly defined.
Additionally, the people in the image appear to be foreigners including people of colour dressed in Western attire.
The synthetic photo also has a glossy finish which is often seen in AI generated images.
We also found two other posts with the same photo posted by different Facebook accounts in January 2024 on January 2 and 3. We could not find any other source or photo credit which mentions where the photo was taken or by whom, which would have been the case if it were a genuine photo.
AI detection tool results
BOOM also tested the viral photo using a deepfake detection tool created by TrueMedia.org. The results indicated while not conclusive, pointed that the photo could be generated by a popular AI image generators, like MidJourney, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion.