Following the recently concluded Bihar Assembly elections, folk singer Maithili Thakur made headlines by winning the Alinagar seat on Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) ticket.
Soon after the results were announced, a photo began circulating online claiming to show Thakur sitting inside an MLA’s office, implying it was taken after her victory.
What we found: At first, we ran a Google reverse image search on the image and found that several social media pages had uploaded it, addressing that Thakur was the youngest MLA in the country.
However, we did not find any official pages of the party or Thakur's which carried the image.
Anomalies in the image: We examined the image closely and found that the facial features looked distorted and the hands seemed conjoined.
This led us to run the image on AI-detection tools such as Sightengine and Was It AI. These tools concluded that the viral image was created using AI.
Sightengine was 81 per cent 'likely' that the image was AI-generated while, Was It AI was 'quite confident' about its result.
Here are the results by Sightengine.
(Source: Sightengine)
Additionally, the oath-taking ceremony for Bihar's 2025 assembly is yet to take place. As per reports, it is scheduled for 20 November.
Conclusion: An AI-generated image of BJP MLA elect Maithili Thakur is being shared as a real one on social media.
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