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.

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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

Fake news alert! An edited picture of a colourful train is circulating in social media with a claim that is from a railway station in Kerala. The claim is false. The train in the image is from Kyoto, Japan. Do not fall for fake news! @GMSRailway @RailMinIndia @PIBFactCheck pic.twitter.com/kiArZnygJR

— DRM Thiruvananthapuram (@TVC138) August 25, 2023

• 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 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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