Fake portraits of police officers killed in crash shared online
What was claimed
Social media posts show portraits of PC Tom Clough and PC Matthew Blades who were killed in a car crash on the A66 near Middlesbrough on Saturday.
Our verdict
These images do not show the officers who were killed. They were made with artificial intelligence.
Social media posts paying tribute to the two police officers who died in a car crash near Middlesbrough on Saturday include fake pictures of the officers involved.
Cleveland Police confirmed to Full Fact that the images are not of the two men who were killed, and that they are AI-generated.
The two officers died when a car travelling the wrong way down a dual carriageway crashed into their vehicle on Saturday 22 August.
Police had been pursuing a Volkswagen Passat until seconds before the collision. PC Clough, 38, and PC Blades, 37, were not involved in the pursuit, but were in the area to assist with a search for the vehicle. The Passat's occupants—Michael Robert Cahill, 23, Jakub Matusiak, 23, Theo Rae, 17, Makai Saddington, 18, and Cole Robert Worthy, 17—also died.
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The images that the graphic claims show PC Clough and PC Blades do not match the images of the two officers released by Cleveland Police. The graphic also contains an invisible SynthID watermark indicating it was “generated with OpenAI tools” such as ChatGPT, the OpenAI API or Codex.
It’s important to consider whether what you see on social media comes from a trustworthy source before sharing. Our Full Fact toolkit and guides to spotting AI-generated images and videos can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because these images do not show the officers who were killed, and they were made with artificial intelligence.
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