|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Claim: A photo has gone viral on social media showing former Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, being escorted by US Immigration officials into a van with cuffs on his hands.
Verdict: DUBAWA Ghana has analysed the image and has found it to have been generated by AI.
Full Text
Former Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has been detained by US immigration authorities over issues related to his immigration status, according to his lawyers.
He is being held at the Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green, Virginia.
Days after widespread reports of his detention, a photo has gone viral showing Mr Ofori-Atta being escorted into a van with two agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These posts, which can be seen here, here, here, and here, have averaged about 1.5K impressions each.
A Ghanaian television station, CTV, used the image during a broadcast discussing the former minister’s detention and has published it on YouTube.
Given the image’s virality, DUBAWA Ghana decided to investigate its authenticity.
Photo of the viral image showing Ken Ofori-Atta with US Immigration officers. Areas within the red circles will indicate that the image has been altered or generated by AI.
Verification
First, DUBAWA Ghana noted that the writing on the ICE badge was not consistently legible on one of the officials. Regardless, we noticed that this badge is inconsistent with either of the two badges that ICE officials are spotted wearing in recent online images.
Again, a search on the ICE Online Detainee Locator System disclosed that Mr Ofori-Atta is being held at the Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green, Virginia. However, a signpost in the image reads “ICE Detention Center, Farmville, VA.” This was another red flag, especially as ICE’s detention facility in Farmville, VA, is called “Farmville Detention Center.”
Google Gemini AI places a four-pointed star in the bottom-right corner of images generated through its tools. This logo is clearly visible at the bottom-right of the viral image.
We also run the image through Google’s SynthID Detector platform, a verification portal that quickly and efficiently identifies AI-generated content created with Google AI.
The tool requires us to upload the image and ask whether it was created or altered by Google AI. Gemini will then check for a SynthID watermark and provide its findings.
“Based on my analysis, most or all of this image was edited or generated with Google AI. It contains a SynthID digital watermark, which is an invisible signal embedded by Google’s AI tools to identify content that has been created or modified by AI,” the SynthID tool reported.
Screenshot showing the finding from using Google’s SynthID tool.
Another prompt to ascertain whether the image was AI-generated confirmed our observations about the uneven rendering of the ICE badge.
Screenshot showing the finding from using Google’s SynthID tool.
Conclusion
There are several indicators that the image was generated by AI.
