Content warning: This story contains graphic images of violence.
A free AI image detector that's been covered in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is currently identifying a photograph of what Israel says is a burnt corpse of a baby killed in Hamas’s recent attack on Israel as being generated by AI.
However, the image does not show any signs it was created by AI, according to Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on digitally manipulated images.
The image was first tweeted by Israel’s official Twitter account, as well as the official Twitter account of the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, after Israel, president Joe Biden, and several media outlets said that 40 Israeli babies were beheaded by Hamas in its attack. No evidence of these alleged beheadings have been made public yet, and that statement has been walked back entirely by the White House, and to a lesser extent, Israel.