AI-Generated Image of Train Shared as Kerala's Onam Special Vande Bharat Express

The Thiruvananthapuram's divisional railway manager's X account dismissed the claim and called it fake.

Khushi Mehrotra
WebQoof
Published:
<div class="paragraphs"><p>The image is not real or related to the Onam festivities in Kerala.&nbsp;</p></div>
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The image is not real or related to the Onam festivities in Kerala. 

(Source: Altered by The Quint

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An image of a colourful train standing on a station decorated with flowers is going viral on the internet. A sign board with the words "Kasaragod - Trivandrum" is also seen in the viral image.

What are the users saying?: Social media users have shared this image with the claim that it is the Vande Bharat Express, which has been decorated in light of the Onam festivities, running in Kerala.

A Vande Bharat express runs from Kasaragod to Thiruvananthapuram and operates 6 days a week.

An archive of the post can be found here

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot) 

(Archives of similar posts can be found here, here and here.)

What is the truth?: The viral image is created using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools by a digital creator, Aneesh Chakkottil, who posted the image on Facebook on 29 July.

  • Thiruvananthapuram's divisional railway manager (DRM) put out a post stating that the viral image was fake.

How did we find out?: Upon doing a reverse image search on Google, we came across a post by Facebook user Aneesh Chakkottil who had uploaded the image of the train on 29 July.

An archive of the post can be found here

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot) 

  • We looked at the comments under this post where the audience had commented, "edited or photoshop," and the user had responded in agreement.

  • Swipe right to see the examples of the comments.

  • We also noticed a watermark, "copper and black" at the top of the image.

Here is a close up of the watermark on the image. 

(Source: Altered by The Quint

  • We looked up Chakkottil's Facebook bio which read that he works at an organisation named, Copper and Black.

  • We searched for confirmation on DRM Thiruvananthapuram's social media pages.

  • We came across a post by them on X(formerly Twitter) which stated that the viral image is false. It further stated that image of the train is from Kyoto in Japan.

  • Taking a cue from this, we searched Google with relevant keywords and came across a picture on a stock image website called PNG tree.

  • The title of the image said, "Rainbow painted train that leaves Kyoto background".

  • We saw more images of the such colourful trains running in Japan.

The link to the website is here

(Source: PNG Tree/Screenshot) 

  • The Quint spoke to digital creator, Aneesh Chakkottil who said that the image was digitally created using a combination of AI tools like Midjourney and image editing software, Adobe Photoshop.

  • He further added that the Copper and Black watermark was the name of the advertising agency that he ran from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

  • We also ran the image on AI-detection websites like Hugging Face and AI or Not and found the following.

  • Hugging Face detected the image as AI-generated with 90 percent.

  • AI or Not declared the image as AI-generated.

Conclusion: The viral image of the colourfully-decorated train is AI-generated and not a real train running in Kerala.

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