The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town’s young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll.
But is it real?
Ask Gemini, the AI service powered by Google, and the answer you receive is no – in fact, Gemini claims the photograph is from two years earlier and more than 2,000km (1,240 miles) away. Rather than graves for small girls killed by a missile, the image “depicts a mass burial site in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey” after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck in 2023. “This specific aerial perspective became one of the most widely shared images of the disaster,” Gemini says, “illustrating the sheer scale of the loss.”
The cemetery image, it turns out, is authentic. Researchers have cross referenced the photo of the site with satellite images that confirm its location, and it can be cross-referenced again with dozens more images taken of the same site from slightly different angles, and again with video footage – none of which experts say show signs of tampering or digital manipulation. The “factchecks” by Gemini and Grok are just one example of a tidal wave of AI-generated slop – hallucinated facts, nonsense analysis and faked images – that are engulfing coverage of the Iran war. Experts say it is wasting investigative time and risks atrocities being denied – as well as heralding alarming weaknesses as people increasingly rely on AI summaries for news and information.
How about we don’t rely on AI to say if something is AI?
How about we take the time to train our actual brains to spot the difference?
Like, that’s the silver lining of dlss 5 for me. Theyre just slapping that stupid AI filter and getting a bunch of blowback, but there was a very brief window where people kept using the same filter on normal pictures.
Not only is that shit useless, it’s functionally dangerous because that blurs the lines. It picks up all the hallmarks of AI, giving false positives that an image isn’t real.
I’m hoping the dlss 5 blowback will kill the AI upscaling of random modern images. And people actually start using their fucking brains.
I mean yeah thats the entire point of the article. All the slop machines were wrong and actual manual research was required to find the truth.