AI image passed off as real photo of firemen kneeling in prayer during LA wildfires
- Published on February 17, 2025 at 08:20
- 4 min read
- By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea
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Following devastating wildfires that ripped through the Los Angeles area in January 2025, South Korean social media users claimed an image of a group of firefighters kneeling in prayer in front of an inferno genuinely showed a scene during the disaster. However, the same image was previously shared in older social media posts with a watermark indicating it was AI-generated. The image also contains a digital signature that suggests it was created using Google AI.
The image, which appears to show a circle of firemen kneeling in prayer while a large fire blazes behind them, was shared on Facebook on February 10.
"Recent wildfire in Los Angeles in the United States. It shows firemen kneeling in prayer after they did their best to put out the fire but failed," reads the Korean-language caption.
The blazes that erupted around Los Angeles on January 7 during hurricane-strength wind storms devoured 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares) and killed about 30 people, before finally being fully contained after three weeks (archived link).
The Palisades and Eaton fires in Southern California's Los Angeles County were the most destructive in the history of the second-largest US city, burning more than 37,000 acres (150 square kilometres) and over 10,000 homes, causing damage estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Facebook users here, here and here shared the image as a genuine one from the fires, but it was in fact generated with AI.
AI image
Google reverse image searches led to several older instances of the image shared online that featured a watermark on the bottom-right corner that read "picture from AI" (archived links here and here).
This disclaimer was cropped out of the false posts.
The "About this image" feature on Google's reverse image search also indicated that the picture was "Made with Google AI".
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).
AI experts also pointed out inconsistencies in the image that indicated it was generated with AI.
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 determined the image was "very likely to be generated by AI" (archived links here and here).
The image contained visual inconsistencies -- such as irregular text on the firefighters' uniforms, inconsistent details on the fire trucks and road markings that changed width and colour -- indicating it was not a genuine photo.
Shu Hu, head of Purdue University's Purdue Machine Learning and Media Forensics Lab in the United States, also said the image was likely AI-generated, with the most apparent artefact being that the "human shadows are indistinguishable, even under strong backlighting" (archived link).
AFP has debunked other AI videos and images of the Los Angeles fires and another of a house that purportedly survived the inferno.
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