Overview
- Automated checks by Sightengine and Hive Moderation scored the circulating images as likely AI-generated, with probabilities ranging from about 80% to nearly 100%.
- U.S. federal rules prohibit courtroom photography, so no authentic images from inside Maduro’s New York hearing exist and only artist sketches are available.
- Courtroom illustrations showed clothing colors and details that contradicted the viral photos, reinforcing that the purported court images were not genuine.
- The New York Times found that major generators, including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI models accessed via third-party sites, and X’s Grok, could quickly produce realistic arrest images despite stated safeguards.
- NewsGuard reported at least five fabricated images and miscontextualized videos related to Maduro’s capture, tallying more than 14.1 million views on X in under two days, and a separate viral image of Cilia Flores was also identified as AI-made.