'Miracle house' spared by LA wildfires is AI-generated

"According to Al-Jazeera, this house belongs to a Muslim and this is the only house that survived the fire in Los Angeles," read part of the caption to an Instagram post that shared the picture on January 13, 2025.

The aerial image appears to show a red-roofed house apparently untouched by the fire surrounded by scorched buildings.

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Screenshot of the false Instagram post, taken January 23, 2025

The image also spread in similar posts in English, French and Indonesian, with some suggesting the house survived the fire thanks to its owners Christian faith. Multiple Thai posts baselessly claimed the house belonged to professional wrestler John Cena.

Wildfires have ravaged 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares) in the Los Angeles area after erupting on January 7 and killing at least 27 people (archived link).

Unfounded conspiracies around the inferno have swirled online, including viral claims it was caused by directed energy weapons or that authorities purposefully set the blazes to encourage the development of so-called "smart cities".

While wildfires can be deliberately ignited, they are often natural and a vital part of an environment's life cycle.

But urban sprawl puts people more frequently in harm's way, and the changing climate -- supercharged by humanity's unchecked use of fossil fuels -- is exacerbating the conditions that give rise to destructive blazes.

While there have been reports about homes that survived the Los Angeles wildfires, AFP found no reports about a house resembling the one in the picture shared online (archived links here, here and here).

AFP photographer David Swanson said he saw no such house during a helicopter ride over Los Angeles on January 10.

'Made with Google AI'

AFP ran a reverse image search on the picture on Google and clicked the "About this image" feature, which revealed a label that said it was "Made with Google AI".

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Screenshot from Google Images, with the AI label highlighted by AFP

Google's DeepMind AI lab launched the SynthID feature in 2023, a tool for digitally watermarking and identifying images made with Google AI (archived link).

"Users can identify if an image, or part of an image, was generated by Google's AI tools through the About this image feature in Search or Chrome," its website says (archived link).

The image was also flagged as being likely generated by AI by the European verification project veraai.eu, in which AFP is a partner. This detector identifies specific traces left by AI image generation software.

Siwei Lyu, director of the University at Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab in the United States, told AFP that his team's DeepFake-O-Meter tool also determined the image was "very likely AI-generated" (archived links here and here).

Matthew Stamm, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University, examined the image using his team's synthetic media detection algorithm, which operates by searching for invisible statistical traces that are left by an image's source (archived link).

"The results of this analysis found evidence that the image was synthetically generated," he told AFP.

"Our algorithm found traces that were inconsistent with real images, but consistent with AI generated images."

Hany Farid, a media forensics expert at the University of California-Berkeley and co-founder of GetReal Labs -- a deepfake detection company -- also "found evidence of AI-generation" when he analysed the image with his team's forensic tool (archived link).

Hawaii home

The picture bears a striking resemblance to a genuine photo of a house that survived the Hawaii wildfires in August 2023 -- suggesting that photo may have been used to create the artificial image.

The photo, which was taken in Lahaina, Hawaii by AFP photographer Patrick Fallon, was misrepresented online as a house miraculously spared by the LA fires because its owner was Muslim.

Below is a screenshot comparison between the AI-generated image (left) and Fallon's photo of a house that survived the Hawaii fires (right):

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Screenshot comparison between the AI-generated image (left) and Fallon's photo of a house that survived the Hawaii fires (right)