Image of scenic 'Polish village' is AI generated

"A village in Poland. There is only one main road in the middle of the village and about 6,000 of its villagers have to share the road. It looks like a great place to live," reads a Burmese-language Facebook post published on February 23, 2025.

The account that published the false post has over 9,000 followers and shared a photo with a single straight main road surrounded by houses and green fields.

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Screenshot taken on March 3, 2025 of the false post

Some users' comments indicated they believed the image is genuine.

"A village built systematically," wrote a user in the comment, while another said, "everything must have been built the same way."

The claim was also shared in other languages -- including Thai and English -- thousands of times earlier in February. The posts go on to claim the image shows the village of Suloszowa in southern Poland, where houses are distinctly clustered along a single strip of road.

However, the image is AI-generated.

Fake image

AFP ran a reverse image search on the picture on Google. The site's "About this image" feature revealed a label that said it was "Made with Google AI".

SynthID, which was launched by Google's DeepMind AI lab in 2023, is a tool to digitally watermark and identify 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).

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Screenshot of the fake picture as seen on Google Images, with the AI label highlighted by AFP

Siwei Lyu, director of the University at Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab in the United States, also told AFP that the photo contained visual clues of an AI-generated image (archived link). 

"This image is determined to be AI-generated by our detection algorithms," he told AFP in an email on February 28. 

"One telltale visual sign is the ratio between the height of the houses and the size of the shadows. For houses of similar sizes (red bars), their shadows (green bars) are very different."

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Shadows of the houses with the irregularities highlighted in an image provided by Siwei Lyu

Photos of the village published in AFP's archive in 2023 show its main thoroughfare winds between the houses -- not a straight road as seen in the fake photo.

Suloszowa's mayor Stanislaw Gorajczyk also told Polish public regional television TVP3 Krakow the photo is "very far from reality" (archived link).

"I was surprised that it is possible to generate such an image," he said. "In some way, it's a kind of publicity, but I think it's a negative publicity. Those who will come in person will see a different reality."

AFP published a tutorial on how to spot AI-generated content.