From Full Fact
Image supposedly showing Israeli soldiers taken prisoner by Hezbollah almost certainly AI-generated
An image is being shared widely on social media with claims that it shows four Israeli soldiers who have been captured by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The picture has been circulating on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, with captions saying: “Hezbollah has captured many Zionist terrorists in South Lebanon.”
But the picture has almost certainly been created using Artificial Intelligence (AI). In addition, we have found no credible, recent reports of soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) being captured by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon...
We contacted Professor Hany Farid, who specialises in digital forensics and image analysis at the University of California, Berkeley, about the veracity of the picture.
He said, via email, that it was “almost certainly an AI-generated image”.
Professor Farid added that his three models, trained to distinguish real from AI images, collectively categorised the pictures as fake.
He went on to say: “In addition, I analysed the cast shadows in the image and they are not physically consistent or plausible. Additionally, you can see garbled text on the backs of the four men—a telltale sign of AI-generation. And lastly, I suspect that the men’s hands were blurred because AI-generators can still sometimes struggle with rendering plausible hands.
“Collectively, there is little doubt that this is an AI-generated image...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
