An image of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi shaking hands with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during what appears to be a conference is being circulated on social media platforms as a real visual.
What did the user say?: An X (formerly Twitter) user named 'Avinash Mathankar' shared the photo with a caption in Hindi that loosely said, "NATION WANT TO KNOW @SupriyaShrinate @abbas_nighat. This meeting took place on which land, its entry is there in which file."
What's the truth?: The image has been generated using the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and does not show a real visual. This makes the claim false.
Discrepancies in the viral image: The banner in the background carried garbled text, which is one of the signs of an image being an AI-generated one.
The viral image also carried a glossy texture, which is another common sign usually spotted in AI visuals.
What did detection tools show?: Team WebQoof passed the image through two AI detection tools namely — 'Hive Moderation' and 'Sight Engine'.
Both the tools showed conclusively results indicating that the image was generated using the help of AI tools.
Swipe right to view all screenshots.
The tool showed over 99 percent probability of the image being an AI one.
(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)
We asked Google's AI tool Gemini to deploy 'SynthID' and check if the image was generated using its tool.
The result concluded that the viral image carried a digital watermark and was indeed created using Google's AI tool.
Conclusion: It is evident that the image was indeed generated using the help of AI tools.
(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on WhatsApp at 9540511818 , or e-mail it to us at webqoof@thequint.com and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories here.)