Altered Image Viral as Photo of Young Sonia Gandhi Smoking a Cigarette

A black-and-white photo, which purportedly shows a young Congress leader Sonia Gandhi smoking a cigarette, has gone viral on social media.

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this image can be seen here and here.)

But...?: The photo has been edited to include Gandhi's face.

• The original one, which has been on the internet since at least 2015, shows an unidentified woman smoking a cigarette.

How did we find out the truth?: We ran a reverse image search across all platforms, using InVID, a verification extension on Google Chrome.

• Google's fact-check explorer tool, which helps users find old versions of an image on the internet, returned results with several links to SoundCloud, a music hosting and streaming platform.

• All SoundCloud links dated back to 2015, and other results in the explorer showed that the image had been shared in 2016 and 2017 onwards as well.

One of the SoundCloud links showed a photo of another woman, not Gandhi, which was used as album art for a song shared nine years ago — in 2015.

One of the more recent results, which was a post on X (formerly Twitter), also carried the photograph, where it was shared with the caption "Ghazale Photographed By Farzad Sarfarazi, 2012."

On comparing this photo to the viral image in the claim, one can clearly see the similarities.

Use of AI tools: To check whether the image had been altered using Artificial Intelligence tools, we submitted the viral photograph to True Media and Illuminarty, which help identify images created or manipulated with AI.

• True Media's tool mentioned that it found "substantial evidence of manipulation."

It expressed a strong certainty that the original image was altered using AI tools.

Illuminarty, which only shows the likelihood of an image being AI-generated, pegged the probability of the image being made by AI tools at 79.4 percent.

Next, we looked for online pages that allow people to edit faces onto other images, such as Faceswapper.ai and submitted the original image along with a photo of Gandhi.

The obtained result closely resembled the viral photo from the claim.

Conclusion: An edited image has gone viral with the false claim that it shows a young Sonia Gandhi smoking a cigarette.

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