AI imagery passed off as genuine pictures of UAE plane crash

Published on January 8, 2025 at 06:38
Updated on January 8, 2025 at 06:39
4 min read
By Raevathi SUPRAMANIAM, AFP Malaysia

Two people were killed after a light aircraft crashed in the United Arab Emirates in December 2024, authorities said, but images of a plane floating in water do not show the wreck. Contrary to false claims circulating on social media, the pictures were in fact AI-generated and do not accurately depict the incident.

"BREAKING: Yet another Plane Crash. Now in UAE. Tragic Loss in Ras Al Khaimah!" read a Facebook post by a Malaysia-based user on December 30, 2024. "A Jazirah Aviation Club plane plummeted into the sea, claiming the lives of both the pilot and co-pilot."

It was accompanied by two images that appeared to show an aircraft floating on water, with parts of it submerged.

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on January 3, 2025

The post surfaced after a light aircraft crashed on December 29, 2024 off the coast of Ras Al Khaimah, one of the UAE's seven emirates, killing two people, the Emirati aviation authority said (archived link).

The aircraft was operated by the Jazirah Aviation Club, with the crash killing both the pilot and co-pilot, the General Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement.

The aviation body said it was investigating the cause of the crash but did not provide further details, and has not released images of the crash as of January 8, 2025.

Similar posts were shared by other users from Malaysia here, here, here, here and here, as well as in the Philippines and India.

Inaccurate depiction

A check on Jazirah Aviation Club's Instagram profile showed that it operated light aircraft and not the jet pictured in the circulating posts (archived link).

According to its website, the club was the first microlight and light sport aircraft club in the UAE to be approved by the General Civil Aviation Authority. It owns 50 aircraft such as microlights, gyrocopters, powered parachutes and paramotors (archived link).

A closer inspection of the two images found both bore the watermark "Grok" on the bottom right as shown in the screenshots below:

Screenshots of the images showing the "Grok" watermark

Grok is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, a company founded by Elon Musk. It uses Aurora, a text-to-image model, to generate images from prompts (archived links here and here).

Shu Hu, head of Purdue University's Purdue Machine Learning and Media Forensics Lab in the United States analysed the images and told AFP they are clearly AI manipulated.

Hu sent AFP images highlighting the visual errors. He said in the first image, the windows of the plane, which he highlighted in red, are misaligned:

Screenshot showing the discrepancies in the image. Marked image provided by Shu Hu.

"Additionally, the pixels adjacent to the plane (green box) are ambiguous, making it unclear whether they belong to the plane," Hu said.

The plane's windows in the second image are not the same size, he added.

He also pointed out that the lines of the aircraft's body and windows were inconsistent with what a genuine photograph would show.

"If this is a real picture, the three lines will generally converge to one point, but these three lines in this picture do not converge to the same point," he said.

Hu provided AFP with a marked image showing the distortion below: