AI-generated image does not show existing mobile phone factory in Zambia
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on November 22, 2023 at 16:55
- Updated on April 26, 2024 at 14:38
- 7 min read
- By Emilie BERAUD, AFP Africa
- Translation and adaptation Tendai DUBE
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The image shows men in grey shirts assembling smartphones in a factory.
“A mobile phone factory in Zambia represents a facility within the country dedicated to manufacturing and assembling mobile phones,” reads a post on X (formerly Twitter) published on November 9, 2023.
“This contributes to local industry, job creation, and technological advancement in Zambia,” the post adds.
Many of the replies to the post identified the image as being AI-generated. Others, however, celebrated the purported announcement.
Similar claims also circulated in French, including here and here. But the picture is not real.
Expert analysis
Software to detect AI-generated images is still being developed and is not completely reliable, even if it can sometimes be used to confirm suspicions of AI use. The most effective tool remains observation, so AFP Fact Check contacted AI specialist Victor Baissait.
“The best way to verify if an image has been generated by AI is to look at what we see in the image; if there are things that are done too well or on the contrary, inconsistent,” Baissait said on November 13, 2023.
"In this image, when you look closely, you see a lot of electronic cards. It's difficult to know if it's true to reality if don't know much about it, but some of the smartphones and graphics cards look a bit stretched,” said Baaissait.
“We also see, in this image, a border which begins and then disappears: this is a clue,” he added.
A closer look indeed shows that some mobile phones and electronic components seem disproportionately large compared to the workers' hands, and in the foreground, the outline of the grey tray containing graphics cards is incomplete.
“The hands, a complex part of the body to represent, are another weak point of AI. Here, they simply seem a little weird, but often AI adds extra fingers, for example,” said Baissait.
In the image, the position of their hands is almost identical, as if they were all performing the same gesture or task simultaneously.
Baissait added: “The person in the foreground has a sort of badge where their employee name would be. But the letters displayed on the label do not correspond to any alphabet.”
He explained that text is another aspect that AI struggles with, especially in small spaces.
“The text must be large in the image for this to work well.”
Baissait suggested that we look for a photograph that shows the same scenario, to see if the one shown is credible.
“For example, in smartphone factories, is it the workers or the machines who do the assembling?” said Baissait.
So we looked for photographs of workers in a mobile phone factory and found these images taken by AFP photographers in 2022 and 2017 in China. They show employees sitting next to each other on the assembly line and handling screens and electronic components.
While the image appears somewhat consistent with what a mobile phone assembly plant looks like, the other clues point more toward an AI-generated image.
Zambia in 2024
A reverse image search found the original image on LinkedIn, published by Geneva’s Ecofin Agency, an online publication with a focus on African economic news (archived here).
The French post, published in early November 2023, announced Kenya’s “first smartphone assembly plant” and Zambia’s plans to launch a factory by June 2024 (archived here).
“Zambia is following suit with the announcement of a future smartphone manufacturing plant scheduled for June 2024. This initiative, revealed by the Minister of Technology and Science, Felix Mutati, at the Africa Fintech Summit 2023, aims to make connectivity more accessible and affordable,” reads the post.
Ecofin Agency also published a French article on its site on November 3, 2023 (archived here).
A browse through the agency’s other LinkedIn posts shows images that appear to be AI-generated.
Ecofin Agency confirmed to AFP Fact Check that the image from November 14, 2023, was generated by AI.
“The image in question was created by our community manager on DALL-E to illustrate the announcement of a smartphone assembly plant project in Zambia.”
DALL-E is a generative AI programme capable of creating images from text prompts, much like Midjourney. It is free if you have a Microsoft account.
The AI-generated image of the assembly line was then circulated across multiple social media platforms without the full context.
AFP Fact Check attempted to recreate a similar image using the prompt: “image of workers sitting on a production line in a smartphone manufacturing factory in Zambia”.
Below are the four generated images that the software came up with. They appear close in style, colours and composition to the image circulating on social media.
While these images do not show an existing factory in Zambia, the government does plan to launch a smartphone factory by June 2024, following the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Zambia and the Chinese technology company ZTE (archived here).
This is not the first time that the landlocked southern African country has invited a foreign company to start this type of industry. In April 2021, the government wanted to see China’s Transsion Holdings set up a phone assembly plant in the country -- such as the one in Ethiopia (archived here).
Back in 2009, local media reported that Zambia’s first mobile phone manufacturing plant, M-mobile Telecommunications (M-Tech), had been officially opened in the capital city Lusaka.
However, in 2011, South Africa’s ITWeb warned that M-Tech “may close if the Zambian government does not move quickly to protect the company against undue competition from China" (archived here).
AFP Fact Check made multiple attempts to contact Zambia's technology and science ministry to find out the status of these projects, but we have not yet received a response.
Metadata updatedApril 26, 2024 Metadata updated
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