A image of a 2-3 years old child widely shared on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram amid the Feni district floods. A large number of people are claimed that, the image is real of the recent incident. However some of are talking it’s AI-generated.
Many people have been asking whether the picture they’ve seen is real or if it was made using AI.
First of all, it’s important to know that there isn’t a tool yet that can say for sure if an image is AI-generated. The results these tools give can help us understand better, but they aren’t always 100% accurate.
I tried checking the picture with three different AI detection tools, and each gave me different results. One tool said the image was 91% AI-generated, another said 40%, and the third one suggested it was “likely human-made.” If we had the original version of the picture, the results might have been more consistent. Usually, when you check the original version of an AI-generated image, the results are clearer. (We consider the result final if the image is shown as more than 70% AI-generated by all tools.)
But in this case, it’s clear that just using tools won’t tell us for sure if the picture is AI-generated.
So, let’s look at it from another perspective.
The picture started spreading online just yesterday. Even after searching thoroughly, no one could find it before yesterday, and it doesn’t appear anywhere outside of social media. Just by looking at it, you can tell that it seems like a professional photographer took it.
If this picture really shows the floods in the Feni-Noakhali area, it would be a very important photo. A professional photographer would have likely published it through a news outlet, considering how serious the situation is. If the photographer was a freelancer, they would probably sell the picture to a news outlet for a good amount of money. So, it’s strange that this photo is only on Facebook. Normally, such an important picture would first appear on a news website with proper credit and a caption, and only then show up on social media. But that didn’t happen with this photo.
If a professional photographer had posted this on their social media, they would usually add a watermark with their name or the name of the organization they work for, especially for such a powerful image. But there’s no watermark on any version of this picture.
The way the child in the picture is looking directly at the camera shows that the photographer was very close, and they probably took several photos or videos in that moment. However, there are no other photos or videos from different angles of this event available online.
In the picture, it’s unusual to see a 2-3-year-old child standing alone in a large area filled with water without any adult nearby. While not impossible, it doesn’t seem very likely.
Also, the child’s lips look a bit strange. And the way there’s a crease on one side of the child’s face, which would normally appear down the middle of the forehead if they were scared, doesn’t look quite natural.
Considering all of these details, it seems more likely that the picture was created rather than showing a real event.