AI image of Turkish demonstrator in Pikachu costume spreads online

A Thai news outlet shared the image of a nighttime rally with a person in a Pikachu costume apparently surrounded by police on TikTok on March 28, 2025.

"Pikachu steals the show!! It appeared at a protest in Istanbul to lift spirits among thousands rallying against the arrest of Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu," read the Thai-language sticker text.

"A surprising moment when someone in a Pikachu costume from the famous cartoon Pokemon joined the protest," reads part of the caption.

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Screenshot of the false TikTok post, taken on March 31, 2025

Posts in English, Spanish, Indonesian and Greek were shared tens of thousands of times with the same claim.

The arrest of Istanbul's opposition mayor Ekrem Imamoglu in a graft and "terror" probe on March 19 triggered Turkey's worst unrest in years, with more than 300 students arrested and detained, AFP reported (archived link).

The 53-year-old Imamoglu from the opposition CHP party is widely seen as the only politician capable of defeating longtime leader Erdogan at the ballot box.

The posts surfaced following news reports that a protester was seen fleeing from the police in an inflatable Pikachu costume (archived here and here).

However, the image circulating online was generated with AI.

'Not authentic'

A reverse image search led to an uncropped version of the image shared on X on March 27, 2025 by a UK-based journalist, though the post has since been deleted.

The full image contains visual inconsistencies, such as a misspelled "Tolis" label on a police van.

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Screenshot of the false X post, with a red circle made by AFP to highlight the visual inconsistency

Digital forensics firm GetReal Labs told AFP the image was "not authentic" and flagged it as AI-generated (archived link).

"All three of our models trained to detect AI-generated images flagged the image as synthetic," the firm said in an email on March 28.

This is just one in a series of examples of AI-generated images circulating alongside real footage during breaking news events such as during Hurricane Milton and the Los Angeles fires, the lab said.

"As synthetic content media becomes more convincing, online audiences will increasingly face unlabeled, fabricated content that's harder to detect in real-time."

There is no foolproof method to spot AI-generated media but identifying visual inconsistencies can help, as errors still occur despite the meteoric progress in generative AI.

AFP previously debunked misinformation related to the Turkey protests in March here, here and here.