how we know an image purporting to show leaders waiting in the White House<\/a> was an AI-generated fake.<\/p>\nWe\u2019ve also been looking at how the image spread – being shared by users across the world. Putting it into Google\u2019s image search function returned hundreds of results. We took the first 250 shares from those – there were many more.<\/p>\n
The earliest copies of the image we\u2019ve seen were posted by Dutch-language X accounts on Monday afternoon, UK time, while the earliest posts with large numbers of views were from pro-Russian accounts – that notched up 1.3 million views.<\/p>\n
The most-viewed copy, of all those we have seen, was posted in the early evening and eventually seen 2.2 million times, leading to a wave of posts over the next hour.<\/p>\n
Those sharing it posted mocking captions, across Twitter and Telegram, in languages including English, German, Italian, Belarusian, Russian, French, Arabic and Polish. This added another 1.7 million views.<\/p>\n
At around 19:00, starting on Ukrainian Telegram and a fact-checking Discord community, posts started pointing out that it was generative AI. These included posts by Ukrainian channels Trukha and Insider UA which gained a million views in total.<\/p>\n
Russian Telegram accounts, including a military commentator, a pro-Kremlin blogger, and a breaking news channel, pointed out that it was AI-generated to more than half a million users. Meanwhile, conservative political US accounts on X began to share it with the acknowledgement it was AI-generated.<\/p>\n
From 20:00 to 22:00, the most-viewed and shared copies we have seen were dominated by people who post fact-checks and verification. Among those who posted was Marek Magierowski, the former Polish ambassador to the US and Israel, who said: \u201cCongratulations to all those who took the bait.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How a fake image went round the world in a few hourspublished at 17:30 British Summer Time 19…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-87317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/b5c4d397-173c-4494-9136-e8dc366915d0.jpg.webp.webp\")
Richard Irvine-Brown![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/8fa6cd10-73b4-4928-8998-924d535d5f0f.png.webp.webp\")
<\/p>\n