A picture shows Syria’s former president Bashar al-Assad in Moscow with American conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson.
There’s no evidence this is a real photo. It has almost certainly been generated using AI.
A picture has been circulating on social media appearing to show Syria’s ousted president Bashar al-Assad in Moscow with American conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson. But there’s no evidence that this is a real photo.
It’s often hard for us to say definitively where an image has originated, but in this case there is strong evidence to suggest it has been generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
A watermark in the bottom right hand corner of most versions of the image says “Grok”—the name of the generative AI chatbot created by Elon Musk's startup, xAI. Grok allows users to generate realistic images from text prompts and is integrated on X (formerly Twitter). A new version of the chatbot is now free to all users of the platform. Images created using Grok feature a similar watermark.
Several examples of the image have the watermark cropped out, but there are also other clues suggesting it has been AI-generated. For example, there appears to be an unnatural curl of the former president’s fingers around his glass of water. As we have written before, generative AI technology often has particular difficulty replicating fingers.
Syrian rebels seized the capital Damascus unopposed on Sunday 8 December with former President Assad reportedly fleeing to Russia.
Mr Carlson was recently in Moscow to interview Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov but there are no credible reports of him meeting with former President Assad. And we’ve not seen any other evidence that this is a real image, or examples of it being used by media outlets.
Full Fact has previously written many times about suspected or confirmed AI images, including examples depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and US Vice President Kamala Harris and President-elect Donald Trump.
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 image has almost certainly been generated by AI and there’s no evidence it’s a real photo.
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