A photo showing skinless human hands stocked on supermarket shelves has gone viral on social media, where people are sharing it as a photo of a store that sells human meat.
At the time of writing this report, this Facebook post was shared about 6,200 times.
(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here, here, and here.)
Is it real?: No. The image has many inconsistencies which indicate that it may have been created using AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools.
How did we find out?: We noticed several inconsistencies in the viral photo.
Many hands seen in the photo are missing fingers – they have a total of four fingers instead of five.
Additionally, the text denoting product and price on the shelves, which appears to be the Cyrillic script, is inconsistent and distorted.
If the labels were actually printed or written by hand, they would not be smudged and widely inconsistent.
What do detection tools say?: We ran this image through some tools which detect whether an image is AI-generated or not.
According to 'Illuminarty', there is a 78.7 percent chance that this image was generated by AI.
Similarly, 'Is it AI' said that there is a 72.66 percent likelihood of the viral photo being AI-generated.
'AI or Not' mentioned that the image is 'likely AI generated'.
However, Hive Moderation's tool contradicted these results, stating that the image was not likely to be AI-generated, and that there was only a 40.1 percent chance of it being made by AI.
(Swipe to view all tools' results.)
Illuminarty.
(Source: Illuminarty/Screenshot)
More on the viral image: We ran a reverse image search on the image for some more information about it.
This led us to the oldest version of the image on the internet, which shared it on 20 March 2024.
It was shared on a Facebook page named 'Nik Art', which mentioned 'Visual arts' in its description.
We found several posts with AI-generated images on this page, which include visuals of aliens at the beach, world leaders and celebrities in Japan "230 years ago", Mother Teresa "fighting poverty" in 1987, and a hot dog dressed as Jesus.
(Swipe to view all posts.)
The Quint has reached out to Nik Art for their inputs and will update this report with their response as and when it is received.
Conclusion: Social media users shared an AI-generated image of skinless human hands at a grocery store, believing it to be a real photo.
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