Ex-Pakistan PM's party shares AI-generated image showing 'woman confronting police'
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on June 5, 2023 at 08:38
- 3 min read
- By Rimal FARRUKH, AFP Pakistan
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The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) published a picture on May 11 to its official Instagram account with more than 2.4 million followers.
It appears to show a woman confronting a group of uniformed men wearing helmets, receiving over 50,000 "likes".
"Gunmen are afraid of an unarmed girl," Urdu-language text superimposed on the picture reads.
The PTI has also published the photo at least twice on its Facebook page here and here. The posts have over 16,000 likes and were shared over 2,000 times.
The posts surfaced after Khan was arrested during a court appearance in the capital Islamabad on May 9 before he was released on bail several days later.
His detention sparked days of street protests freighted with anger at the powerful army perceived to have orchestrated his downfall, AFP reported (archived link).
The image was also shared elsewhere on Twitter here and here and on TikTok with a similar claim, misleading users who appeared to believe it is genuine.
"Brave woman," one user wrote.
"This picture will be the most powerful one in [the] history of Pakistan," another wrote.
However, it was in fact generated by artificial intelligence (AI) software.
AI-generated image
A Google reverse image search found the picture was first published on Twitter here on May 11 by a user with the handle @kursed (archived link).
The Twitter user told AFP he created the picture with a prompt on MidJourney, an AI program that generates images based on text prompts entered by users (archived link).
He used a prompt on MidJourney for the image, part of which reads: "ultra realistic photography, under ideal mid evening light, a defiant woman in traditional Pakistani dress, carrying a medium sized stick in her hand, facing toward line of policemen wearing crowd control gear."
The full prompt can be seen in a screengrab sent to AFP by the Twitter user:
The user told AFP he decided to create the picture after seeing a video of a woman being dragged away by police by her hair as she confronted the officers.
"I saw her video going viral on Twitter. And just wanted to record that visual perspective. I did not anticipate the image would go viral," he said.
The image and the prompt was also shared on the MidJourney subreddit here.
An analysis by AFP reveals the woman's left hand does not show individual fingers -- such distortions of human hands are a common sign that a picture was generated with AI software.
AFP has published a list of signs that indicate a picture may have been generated with AI software here.
AFP has also debunked claims related to protests by Khan's supporters here, here and here.
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