Republicans fooled by AI-generated image of US crew member rescued in Iran

Republican politicians were hoaxed over the weekend by an image purporting to be a downed US warplane crew member rescued by military special forces in Iran on Saturday, igniting a call for a national “crash course in media literacy”.

Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and a US senate candidate and Mike Lawler, a New York representative, were all caught out for “liking” a fake picture of the airman, who has not been publicly identified.

Donald Trump on Monday afternoon was scheduled to hold a news conference in which he was expected to discuss details of the rescue mission.

The AI-generated image that fooled the Republican politicos was shared by a pro-Trump X account. The supposed airman is shown surrounded by smiling military members, with a US flag draped across his lap.

The fake image has been reshared more than 21,000 times on the X platform and now carries a warning: “This photo probable AI generated”.

“This is so awesome,” Abbott wrote to his 1.4 million X followers in a since-deleted post. Alluding to how the rescue operation began and ended, respectively, on Friday and Sunday of Easter weekend, the governor added: “God is sending a message to our enemies!”

Lawler also shared the picture, adding the caption: “God Bless America!”

AI slop around news events has rapidly become commonplace. After US forces seized Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator, in January, AI-generated images flooded social media of him being escorted off a plane by US law enforcement agents, jubilant Venezuelans, and missiles raining down on Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

At the time, NewsGuard misinformation editor Sofia Rubinson said that fake images are sometimes plausible because they “do not drastically distort the facts on the ground”.

But Rubinson warned “the use of AI-generated fabrications and dramatic, out-of-context footage is being used to fill gaps in real-time reporting and represents another tactic in the misinformation wars”.

After Abbott’s error, Billy Binion of the libertarian magazine Reason wrote: “This kind of stuff is bleak. I get that we’re in a new era, but we desperately need a new crash course in media literacy, or just a reminder to be remotely discerning.”

The Texas governor, who didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, has been duped before. In March, he posted what he believed was footage of an Iranian plane being shot down by a US warship – but the film was taken from the second world war-themed video game War Thunder.

Furthermore, in 2023, he was widely mocked after sharing a fake article about country singer Garth Brooks being booed off a Texas stage over supporting Bud Light while the beer brand faced real-life criticism from US political conservatives for working with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a promotional campaign.

Republicans are not the only political customers for image fakes. An AI-generated picture of Trump using a walker uploaded by Democratic party strategist Keith Edwards was viewed about 13.5m times in December, according to an article in Futurism.

Gavin Newsom, the California governor, has become practiced at posting AI-generated fakes to reinforce political messaging, including one that showed Trump, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller being led away by the FBI in handcuffs.

A fake image of federal agents surrounding Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex Pretti with one holding a gun against his head was widely shared after a border patrol officer killed Pretti in January. Fakes were also created after US citizen Renee Good was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent days earlier.

“Details can get mistaken or altered in a way that is dangerous in these very volatile situations,” University of California digital forensics expert Hany Farid told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “In the fog of war and in conflict, it is just really messy, and we are simply adding noise to an already complicated and difficult situation.”