Fact check: Image of musicians contains signs of AI generation

A social media post included a photograph with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin and former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney alongside three members of Korean boy band BTS.

The post read: “Just saw this photo and it’s amazing Paul McCartney, Chris Martin, RM, Jin and JK are all in the same frame.”

Evaluation

This is an image that has been manipulated or created by AI. It was recognised by Google’s Gemini as having been created or edited by a Google AI product.

The facts

The image shows the five men standing by a large pond, with one of the BTS members appearing to take a selfie of the group. There are houses in the background that look to be British in style.

The image has a timestamp in the bottom right corner which reads “Oct 26, 10:15 am”.

Google’s own tools detected a so-called SynthID watermark. This is an invisible system which helps Google determine if an image was either generated or edited by Google’s AI models.

Google users can check if an image they have come across was made by Google’s AI models by uploading it to Gemini and asking “Is this AI-generated?” or a similar question.

OpenAI also offers a version of this, but each company can current only detect images its own models have made. So if Gemini cannot find a Google SynthID watermark, that does not exclude the image having been made or edited with a different company’s models.

Links

Post on X (archived)

Google – Verify AI-generated images, videos, and audio (archived)

About PA’s fact checks

If you have any suggestions for future fact checks, objections or comments, please send them to factcheck@pamediagroup.com, including any relevant links. For more information on how to submit a correction or dispute a rating, please refer to our Corrections and complaints policy