AI-Generated Image Falsely Peddled as New McDonald's Logo Based on 'Cow Meat'

This is an AI-generated image and does not show McDonald's new logo.

Fact-check: An AI-generated image of cow's head and meat resembling McDonald's logo is being falsely shared as a real logo.

(Photo: The Quint)

(TRIGGER WARNING: GRAPHIC MEAT VISUALS)

A photo showing a graphic depiction of a cow's head and its meat to resemble American fast food chain McDonald's logo is going viral on the internet.

• Users sharing this image are claiming that this is new logo of McDonald's recently launched in the United States.

• The claims also advocate "boycotting" the company as this logo offends the religious beliefs of the Hindu community.

An archive of the post can be seen here.

(More archives of similar claims can be found here and here.)

What's the truth?: This image has been created using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

• McDonald's has not adopted this as its official logo.

How did we find out the truth?: On performing a relevant keyword search, we did not find any reports backing this claim.

• McDonald's official website and social media platforms did not carry this logo or image anywhere.

• We performed a reverse image search on the viral image, leading us to a post on X (formerly Twitter) shared by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

• The credit was given to Itzhak Garbuz.

The post can be seen here.

• We looked up Garbuz's social media pages and found the viral image uploaded on his Facebook page on 19 September.

• The caption mentioned that this image was created by artificial intelligence.

The post can be seen here.

• We also went through the comments on this post where Garbuz specified that they created this image using Stable diffusion a1111 + ControlNet.

Screenshots of comments on his original post.

Screenshots of comments on his original post.

We have also reached out to the artist and McDonald's for their official statements and the story would be updated once we receive responses from them.

Conclusion: An AI-generated image of cow's head and meat resembling the McDonald's logo is being falsely shared as a real logo.

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