A Facebook post from an account with more than a million followers claims to show a house in Nepal that remained standing during the recent floods. The post has thousands of likes, comments and shares.
A very similar house did survive the floods, but the image in this post was made with AI—even though a caption on it says “This home in Nuwakot, Nepal survived a flood that swept the valley away”.
When Full Fact put the image through OpenAI’s detector, it told us that it was generated with OpenAI tools.
We also gave the image to Professor Siwei Lyu, an expert in digital forensics at the University at Buffalo, and his team. He told us: “The circulating image is AI-generated. It is a synthetic re-rendering, not an authentic photograph.”
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He pointed to “severe hand deformities” in the figures on the balcony, and “rigid, triangular shapes filled with messy, repeating patterns” in the water.
AI-generated images can be hard to distinguish from real photographs. Our Misinformation Toolkit offers some tips and tricks to help verify what you’re looking at before you share it with others.
