What was claimed
An image shows a house that survived flooding in Nepal.
Our verdict
Although a similar house did survive the floods, this image is an AI-generated fake.
Fake image of Nepal house goes viral
A Facebook post from an account with more than a million followers claims to show a house in Nepal that remained standing during the recent floods. The post has thousands of likes, comments and shares.
A very similar house did survive the floods, but the image in this post was made with AI—even though a caption on it says “This home in Nuwakot, Nepal survived a flood that swept the valley away”.
When Full Fact put the image through OpenAI’s detector, it told us that it was generated with OpenAI tools.
We also gave the image to Professor Siwei Lyu, an expert in digital forensics at the University at Buffalo, and his team. He told us: “The circulating image is AI-generated. It is a synthetic re-rendering, not an authentic photograph.”
Join 75,000 newsletter subscribers who trust us to check the facts
Sign up to get weekly updates on politics, immigration, health and more.
Subscribe to weekly email newsletters from Full Fact for updates on politics, immigration, health and more. Our fact checks are free to read but not to produce, so you will also get occasional emails about fundraising and other ways you can help. You can unsubscribe at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy.
He pointed to “severe hand deformities” in the figures on the balcony, and “rigid, triangular shapes filled with messy, repeating patterns” in the water.
AI-generated images can be hard to distinguish from real photographs. Our Misinformation Toolkit offers some tips and tricks to help verify what you’re looking at before you share it with others.
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 although a house like this exists, this image is an AI-generated fake.