On December 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited New Delhi, the capital of India, for a two-day trip. Against this backdrop, two images spread on social media, claiming that posters reading ‘Stepdown Yunus’ were seen on various lamp posts on the streets of Delhi.
See some posts circulated on Facebook with this claim: here, here.
See the Instagram post with the same claim here.
See the same image on TikTok here. The TikTok post has been viewed at least 74 thousand times.
Fact-check
The Rumor Scanner team’s investigation reveals that the discussed images are not real; rather, they were created using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology.
In the investigation on this matter, the discussed images were not found in Indian media or any reliable source. Upon subsequent observation of the images, a few subtle inconsistencies were noticed. For example, the positioning of the lower part of the Metro rail line running beneath the flyover is inconsistent. The train is seen behind a pillar, but the train track is visible in front of the pillar.
Subsequently, to determine if the two images were AI-generated, multiple tools, including the AI-assisted content detector ‘DeepFake-O-Meter,’ were used. These tools indicated a probability of at least 88 percent to a maximum of 99 percent that the images were created with AI.
Ashish Kumar Kashyap, a fact-checker at the Delhi office of the Indian news outlet India Today, informed Rumor Scanner that such streets and roads are more or less visible everywhere in Delhi. However, a road of this type, where a Metro line runs beneath a flyover without any pillars, is not seen in Delhi. The color of the government buses and auto-rickshaws, however, is exactly like that in Delhi.
Additionally, Rumor Scanner observed Google’s Gemini AI tool generating similar images when given nearly the same command.
That is, the two images were created and circulated using AI tools with commands regarding the vehicles and surrounding elements of Delhi’s streets.
Therefore, the two AI-generated images, which were circulated as real photos of ‘Stepdown Yunus’ posters on the streets of Delhi, India, are false.
Sources
- Rumor Scanner’s analysis