A photo shows Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on a beach with Ghislaine Maxwell.
This picture is fake. An uncropped version features a watermark in the bottom right corner suggesting it was made by the artificial intelligence chatbot ‘Grok’, which creates images from prompts.
A fake photo which appears to show the new Prime Minister of Canada, and former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, on a beach with Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking, is recirculating on social media.
As we explained last month, this photo was almost certainly generated with artificial intelligence (AI).
The photo shows Mr Carney sitting alongside Maxwell and another person resembling US actor Tom Hanks. A screenshot of a post on X (formerly Twitter) including the fake image and captioned “Why was Canada's new Liberal woke Prime Minister Mark Carney on Epstein Island with Ghislaine Maxwell & Tom Hanks !!!” has been shared on Instagram in recent days in the wake of Mr Carney’s appointment. He has since called a snap election for 28 April.
Both the X post and the Instagram screenshot of it crop the image above the ankles of the man who resembles Mr Hanks. This appears to crop out a watermark which suggests that the image was AI-generated. When we fact checked this photo before, a ‘Grok’ watermark could be seen in the bottom right hand corner.
Grok is a generative AI chatbot integrated into X and developed by Elon Musk’s startup, xAI. It allows users to generate realistic images from text prompts. We’ve recently checked other images generated by Grok that have been shared as if they are genuine.
Some of the hands in the image look misshapen, particularly Maxwell’s visible hand and the third person’s left hand. Issues replicating hands and fingers are a tell-tale sign an image has been created with AI.
The post refers to private islands in the Virgin Islands that were owned by Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for helping Epstein sexually abuse young girls.
Fact checkers at Agence France Presse (AFP) have recently written about other images appearing to show Mr Carney and Maxwell together, that are almost certainly AI-generated. Full Fact has not seen any evidence that Mr Carney and Maxwell have ever been together on the private islands owned by Epstein.
However, genuine photos do exist that appear to show Mr Carney and Maxwell at a festival in Oxfordshire in 2013. According to the Toronto Sun, Mr Carney’s campaign said Maxwell had been a friend of his sister-in-law, and their meeting had been before Maxwell’s charges.
We’ve previously written about similar edited or AI-generated images showing other public figures with Epstein, including former Vice President Kamala Harris and President Donald Trump.
Our guides offer some useful tips on identifying AI and other misleading images.
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 this isn’t a real photo and was almost certainly generated using artificial intelligence.
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