Claim
Photo of Indian-origin NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and her colleague Butch Wilmore with US President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The astronauts safely returned to Earth on Tuesday (US local time) following an unexpected 286-day mission, splashing down off Florida’s coast in a SpaceX capsule.
The archived version of the post can be seen here.
Fact
Along with the overly smooth texture, Newschecker also noticed the watermark of Grok, an AI assistant by xAI, in the bottom-right corner of the viral image, suggesting that it was AI-generated. Also, we did not find any such photograph in the extensive media coverage of the astronauts’ return to Earth.
We then ran the image past Hive Moderation, an AI image detection tool, which found it 99.6% likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content. The SightEngine tool, too, found the viral image 99% likely to be AI-generated, confirming that it was not a real photo.
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