Key Facts

• Two photos claiming to show an elderly couple attacked during French unrest were created by AI.
• The images were shared millions of times, mostly by far-right social media accounts.
• The pictures were made using OpenAI tools and checked by a digital watermark system called SynthID.
• Visual errors in the images, like a woman with four fingers and two heads on one body, showed they were fake.
• The images originated from a pro-Israel account that published AI-generated content.
• A French journalist reported an elderly couple had been attacked, citing a police source, but no official confirmation exists.
• The Paris prosecutor’s office said no attack report had been filed by the time of fact-checking.
• The false images fueled misleading claims linking the unrest to religious and ethnic groups.