What was claimed
Pictures show a Beaver Scout group visiting a mosque, with one image showing a boy kneeling while another remains standing.
Our verdict
These images aren’t real and have been made with artificial intelligence.
AI images from Beaver Scouts mosque visit circulate online
AI-generated photos of a Beaver Scout trip to a mosque have been shared on social media.
We previously fact checked an edited image of a real group visit, which falsely included a bearded man in white in the background who was not in the genuine footage of the event.
But now additional images which have been totally fabricated using artificial intelligence are being shared online with claims they show the same visit. These do not match real footage of the trip.
New images we’ve seen being shared online bear no resemblance to the real footage, and show different children, wearing different clothes in a different room. The new pictures also all contain a SynthID watermark that shows they were “generated with OpenAI tools” such as ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, or Codex.
Genuine pictures and footage of the visit in Scotland have been widely shared online, showing several children kneeling and one boy standing up, with some on social media critical of the visit.
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We have chosen not to directly link to either the genuine or altered imagery in this fact check, and we have blurred the faces of the children in the screengrabs above.
Before sharing content like this, first consider whether it comes from a verifiable and trustworthy source. Our guide to spotting AI content, and toolkit on how to identify bad information, 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 aren’t real and have been made with artificial intelligence.