Following the arrest of former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, a set of two images have gone viral across social media. The images showing Khan are being shared with the claim that it shows him following his arrest.
Imran Khan was arrested on May 9, 2023 at Islamabad High Court by paramilitary troops over corruption charges. The former Pakistan PM’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party asked its supporters to carry out protests over his arrest, leading to violence in major cities across the country.
Claim:
AajTak Bangla published both images in a report with the headline, ‘Imran Khan Arrest: Pakistan is burning, how is Imran in jail? Picture leaked’.
AajTak shared the same image in a tweet as well. The Hindi news channel also claimed that the image shows Imran Khan arrested.
Fact Check:
We conducted a reverse image search on the viral image and came across a Facebook post published by user ‘Feroz WaXir’ on May 10, 2023.
The Facebook post is captioned, “Imran Khan, former Prime Minister of Pakistan and Chairman PTI after his arrest.”
The images carry the watermark ‘exclusive by midjourney’. Midjourney is a generative AI tool that creates hyper-realistic images based on text prompts. The AI tool generates images from natural language descriptions, called “prompts”, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.
We observed the images carefully and noticed that Imran Khan has seven toes in the image. We compared this with other real images and noted that this is a discrepancy that is present in artificially generated images. Below, you can see the comparison.
We also observed that the hands of Khan blurred together, which is another anomaly generated by the AI tools.
Conclusion:
We found that the image of Imran Khan in jail following his arrest is an image generated by an AI generative tool named ”Midjourney.” The images are not legitimate from the anomalies present in the viral output. Thus, the image is circulated by media outlets with a false caption.
If you have any news that you believe needs to be fact-checked, please email us at factcheck@thelogicalindian.com or WhatsApp at 6364000343.
https://thelogicalindian.com/h-upload/2023/05/11/500x300_231474-new-project-2023-05-11t143443043.webp
Fact Check
2023-05-11 13:00:00.0
AajTak Passes Off AI-Generated Image Of Imran Khan In Jail As Real
