Image of Iranian World Cup footballer with school backpack is AI-generated
- Published on June 17, 2026 at 22:54
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
The Iranian men's national football team brought children's backpacks onto the pitch before a March 2026 friendly as a tribute to the victims of a strike that hit a school at the start of the Middle East war, but an image purporting to show a player recreating the moment during the side's World Cup match against New Zealand is inauthentic. It depicts a fictional athlete in a nonexistent kit, and OpenAI's image verification tool assessed it was generated with the company's artificial intelligence programs.
"Iran paying tribute with pink backpacks to 168 schoolgirls murdered by donald trump at the fifa world cup is a viciously quiet read," says a June 16, 2026 post sharing the image on Threads. "The backpacks are pink, the sentence is pitch black."
Similar posts pinballed across platforms including X and Bluesky as Iran rallied from behind to snatch a 2-2 draw against New Zealand in their opening match at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The game, played in Los Angeles, followed months of uncertainty surrounding the squad's participation in the tournament amid the war in the Middle East, which began in late February with US-Israeli strikes that killed Iran's supreme leader. The FIFA competition is being jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Officials from the United States and Iran were preparing to meet to sign a deal, announced June 14, to end the war and re-open the vital Strait of Hormuz to shipping.
A strike that hit a primary school in the southern city of Minab on the first day of the war killed at least 73 boys and 47 girls among more than 150 fatalities, Iranian officials have said.
Neither the United States nor Israel have officially claimed responsibility for the attack, with President Donald Trump initially suggesting Iran itself might have been behind it, but investigations by Bellingcat and The New York Times reported the school was hit by a US Tomahawk cruise missile.
As Iran's national anthem played before its men's football team's March 28 match with Nigeria, the country's players wore black armbands and posed with school rucksacks to honor the victims of the Minab blast.
But AFP found that the image claimed online to show an Iranian footballer brandishing a similar backpack at the World Cup is a fabrication generated by AI.
The person depicted does not resemble any member of the Iran national team's 26-man World Cup roster, nor does his uniform match the authentic kits Team Melli wore against New Zealand (archived here).
The arena in the image is also visibly different from the stadium where the game took place in Los Angeles.
The image also appears to carry some irregularities typical of AI, including inconsistent petals on the backpack's stitched-on flowers.
OpenAI's image verification tool found the visual contained a SynthID -- the invisible watermark integrated from Google that the company is now using to embed signals in AI-generated media created with its platforms (archived here and here).
The company's verification tool determined the content "was generated using OpenAI tools."
The Hive Moderation tool similarly concluded the image was "likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content," attributing it to GPT-4o.
Unsurface, another media authentication tool that uses peer-reviewed methods to detect synthetic content, also found strong evidence from the image's "forensic traces" that it was AI-generated.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the World Cup here, here, here and here.
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