An image shows a girl on a boat carrying a puppy which was taken during flooding in south-eastern US states.
This isn’t correct. The picture appears to have been generated using AI, and isn’t a real image of the flooding that occurred following Hurricane Helene.
An image of a distressed child in a boat holding a puppy amid severe flooding appears to have been generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The picture has been shared widely on X (formerly Twitter), and also on Facebook in recent days, sometimes with captions claiming that it shows a child in North Carolina, where at least 100 have been killed by severe storms and flooding.
In it, a girl with dark hair in a life jacket appears to be sitting in a green boat on floodwaters, crying and holding a puppy. One caption says: “This picture has been seared into my mind. My heart hurts”.
However, the picture being shared is not a real image from the floods.
It appears to have been created using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Additionally, although the image of the girl looks realistic, in uncropped versions you can see her left hand only has four fingers, and is missing a fourth knuckle.
Another giveaway is the image’s tell-tale unnatural gloss or sheen, where the software overly smoothes textures—as can be seen on the girl’s face and arms, and the life jacket itself.
North Carolina is one of several south-eastern US states that have been hit by severe flooding in the wake of Hurricane Helene, with six months’ worth of rain falling in days.
It is estimated that 225 people have been killed so far and hundreds more are missing, as well as homes being destroyed and roads collapsing.
President Joe Biden has deployed 1,000 troops to the affected states to help with emergency response efforts, on top of 4,800 federal personnel who have been sent to the region.
We have written a number of times about AI-generated images being presented as if they are real, including an image claimed to show ‘human meat’ for sale and a fake viral image of Pope Francis addressing crowds in Lisbon.
Our guide to spotting AI-generated images can help you distinguish between faked photos and the real thing online.
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 the image appears to have been created using Artificial Intelligence, and is not a real image from the US floods.
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