A photo from a campaign rally in Michigan for U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz went viral in social media posts falsely claiming the picture had been AI-generated to inflate the size of the crowd.
The crowd in the photo from the campaign matches images of the same scene taken by Reuters and other media sources, however. The Harris campaign said the image is unaltered and a forensic image analyst has said publicly there are no signs of it being AI-generated.
AI ACCUSATIONS
The widely shared image was first posted on X on Aug. 7 by Harris campaign Battleground Mobilization Director Bhavik Lathia, who said his colleague Michigan Digital Director Ben Sarle sent him the image.
But posts on social media resharing the image said the crowd was fake and that the picture was AI-generated.
In a subsequent post including the viral photo, Trump said: “Look, we caught her with a fake ‘crowd.’ There was nobody there!”
The Harris campaign’s @KamalaHQ account on X, responding to Trump’s post, said, “This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan.”
A campaign official told Reuters in an email that the photo was taken by a Harris campaign staff member “and not modified by AI in any way.”
OTHER MEDIA SHOW CROWDS
Photos and videos from media sources at the rally also show thousands of supporters in the crowd.
Reuters photographers captured the Democratic presidential candidate and vice presidential running mate exiting Air Force Two for a campaign rally at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Romulus, Michigan.
A livestream of the campaign rally by PBS NewsHour shows the crowd in the moments before, during, and after Harris and Walz arrived on Air Force Two starting at the 24-minute timestamp.
A 41-second clip of Harris and Walz arriving at the rally published by Fox News also shows the camera panning to the crowd, including supporters closer to the podium, where the sizable crowd is clearly visible starting at the 0:30 timestamp.
Hany Farid, a professor of computer science with a specialization in image analysis and digital forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, in a post on LinkedIn addressing the narrative, said two AI-detecting models found “no evidence of AI-generation.”
“While the lack of evidence of manipulation is not evidence the image is real. We find no evidence that this image is AI-generated or digitally altered,” Farid said in the LinkedIn post.
VERDICT
False. Photos and videos from multiple news organizations indicate the Harris campaign did not inflate the size of the crowd at the rally in Michigan with an AI-generated image.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work.
