Has an ‘AI enhanced’ image helped fuel online claims about Trump’s health?published at 12:54 British Summer Time
12:54 BST
Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist
After days of unsubstantiated rumours about the US president’s health, a manipulated picture of Donald Trump began to spread online yesterday.
The image distorts the president’s face, especially around his eyes.
Some social media users have used this manipulated picture to claim that Trump has suffered a health crisis – with their posts getting millions of views online.
But the image was generated by a user of the X social media platform who used artificial intelligence (AI) to “enhance” a long-distance news agency photograph of the president that was taken on Monday as he left the White House to play golf.
So how does “AI-enhancement” technology actually work?
These tools are trained on lots of high-quality images, which are then blurred so the AI can learn to predict what a clearer version might look like.
So when you ask an AI tool to “unblur” an image, it is just making a prediction based on the images it has been trained on, says Prof Thomas Nowotny, head of the AI research group at the University of Sussex.
One sign that the image has been manipulated are the USA letters on Trump’s hat where you can see the “S” looks distorted.
Nowotny suggested this could be based on a faint pattern in the original picture and another expert we spoke to thought it was likely just a corruption of the picture.
“If you want to enhance your holiday snaps to be sharper, more colourful and crisper and don’t need them to actually reflect reality, it’s the perfect tool,” says Nowotny.
“If you are working on an image to extract more information about an underlying truth, it is a risky path to take.”
