A synthetic image created using AI showing police personnels apprehending former United States president Donald Trump and taking him into custody is currently being shared on social media as a real incident.
The AI generated image is circulating with a collage of three photos showing a man named Bussa Krishna worshipping a Trump idol in a temple built in honour of the former US President.
The photos have been shared as the ex-US president faced indictment over charges of paying hush money allegedly to a woman named Stormy Daniels who he had an affair with. On April 4, Trump surrendered himself and was placed under arrest prior to his appearance before the court. However, the Republican leader pleaded not guilty of all the charges.
The picture is captioned in Hindi as, "Please release me because I am the friend of "Vishwa Guru" and the god of blind supporters".
(Original Text in Hindi: मुझे छोड़ दो मैं "विश्व गुरु" का दोस्त और अंधभक्तों का भगवान हूँ)
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Fact Check
BOOM performed a reverse image search on Google and found that open-source investigative website Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins tweeted a similar set of AI-generated images of Donald Trump from his official Twitter handle in March this year.
Higgins created the thread of pictures using a generative AI tool Midjourney amid the speculation that Trump could be indicted over charges of paying money to Daniels.
The British journalist, later, tweeted that Midjourney 'banned him from generating artificial images of Trump on the platform' as it created a controversy at that time.
Further, we noticed discrepancies in the viral image - the hands of the police personnel look strikingly odd and out of place. According to research, this is a discrepancy observed in AI generated images - the inability to create human fingers in a realistic manner.
BOOM was also able to create similar fake images of Donald Trump being apprehended by New York Police Department (NYPD) officials using Midjourney. The AI-generated images created by BOOM for reference purpose can be seen below.
Why AI Struggles To Create Human Fingers?
Jim Fan, an AI researcher, took to Twitter to address reasons because of which generative AI tools encounter problems to render human fingers properly.
Fan said that the data size to train generative AI tools about human hands is much less compared to the face pictures. The hands in a full-body image created artificially tend to occupy much smaller pixel, he added.
The researcher also pointed out that the lack of embodied understanding is a major issue in an artificially created picture. He said that AIs need to infer the shapes of hands in various positions by superficial pattern matching as the programs never use hands in a real world.
However, Fan appreciated Midjourney V5 for reducing this problem significantly. He added that AI's inability to create hands can be addressed by collecting more data specifically for hands and performing a lot of data augmentation to multiply the data.