After protesters took to the streets in Paris in a show of grassroots opposition to President Emmanuel Macron and planned austerity measures, an old video resurfaced in posts falsely claiming it showed the demonstrations in the French capital. The footage was in fact filmed in Poland’s capital Warsaw and previously circulated in a post about an independence day rally in the city in November 2017.
Technology
An image circulating widely online appears to show Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah resident accused of shooting dead US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, wearing a T-shirt supportive of President Donald Trump. But the photo is altered; the original, lifted from Robinson’s mother’s since-deactivated Facebook page, showed the suspect in a plain top.
AI-generated images of a flattened neighbourhood have been falsely shared online as genuine after a deadly earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous region in August and killed over 2,200 people. The visuals bore errors that indicate they are inauthentic.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Poland recently sounded the alarm over a growing online trend of social media posts sharing AI-generated images of alleged Holocaust victims. In July 2025, pictures of a violinist playing in concentration camps spread across the internet, posted alongside a fabricated story. While musicians did play a part in life inside the Nazi-run camps, the image does not depict a real person, and visual inconsistencies point to the content likely being AI-generated.
“We need to avoid getting involved in this conflict #trump #maga #israel #iran #middleeast #wwiii,” says a June 15, 2025 post sharing the video on Instagram.
An AFP investigation identified dozens of YouTube and TikTok pages that have been churning out AI-generated messages delivered in the pope’s voice or otherwise attributed to him since he took charge of the Catholic Church last month.
Climate change deniers are pushing an AI-generated paper questioning human-induced warming, leading experts to warn against the rise of research that is inherently flawed but marketed as neutral and scrupulously logical.
The fabricated Time magazine cover was shared on X on February 10, 2025.
“According to Al-Jazeera, this house belongs to a Muslim and this is the only house that survived the fire in Los Angeles,” read part of the caption to an Instagram post that shared the picture on January 13, 2025.
“MAJOR ALERT: THE JAIL OUTSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE IS ALMOST COMPLETE !!! ARE YOU READY TO SEE ARRESTS ???” says a November 30, 2024 X post.