A photo of suspected gunman, Cole Tomas Allen, at the White House correspondents' dinner with a woman is being circulated on the internet to claim that it shows his Indian wife named 'Priyanka Rao'.
Along with this, a purported image of Rao's Indian passport is also going viral as the supporting evidence.
What have users said?: An X (formerly Twitter) premium user named 'Baba Thoka' shared the image with a caption that said, "The perpetrator of the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, 31 year old Cole Tomas Allen, with his Indian wife, Priyanka Rao."
What are the facts?: Both the images have been generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. The alleged passport of Rao had several discrepancies, which clearly showed that it was fake.
Discrepancies in the passport: We noticed that the passport carried multiple anomalies that raised questions about the authenticity of the viral image.
'Cole Thomas Allen' (misspelt name of the accused) was written under the Nationality section.
The Hindi translation of Place of Issue and Date of Issue appeared to be garbled and did not make proper sense.
The name of spouse was mentioned as Priyanka Rao, which was the name of the passport holder.
Running the image on Gemini: Team WebQoof ran the image on Gemini and asked it to deploy SynthID in order to check if the document was indeed AI or not.
The tool responded by saying, "Based on my analysis using SynthID, all or most of this image was generated or edited with Google AI."
About the couple photo: We passed the first image through two detection tools namely — 'Hive Moderation' and 'SightEngine' to verify its authenticity.
While the first tool showed over 99 percent probability, the second one gave around 98 percent chances of the image being generated using AI.
Additionally, we did not find any news reports that indicated Allen's wife being an Indian named Priyanka Rao.
The tool showed over 99 percent probability of the image being generated using AI.
(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)
Conclusion: Evidently, both the images have been generated using AI tools and are being shared with a false claim.
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