AI images of PM Modi and Rahul Gandhi viral as miracles of nature

A photo of a group of palm trees on a small island is being circulated widely on social media. The shape of the leaves and positioning of the trees against the sky seem to create an effect which resembles an image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Several social media users amplified it as a miracle of nature. Others also claimed that this picture was taken by a French photographer in Gokarna, Karnataka.

A Twitter user shared another such image in which the branches and tree line are shaped in such a way that they appear to create an image of Congress leader and MP Rahul Gandhi. He said it was clicked by an Australian in South Goa.

The image is being circulated widely across social media platforms.

Fact Check

At the first glance, the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to be the work of artificial intelligence. When we performed a reverse image search of the photo in question, we found a mention of it in a tweet by a user named Madhav Kohli.

Do you see him too? pic.twitter.com/QjJzO4fBbF

— Madhav Kohli (@mvdhav) September 23, 2023

When another user asked Kohli which application he used to create the image, he replied that it was Stable Diffusion.

Stable diffusion

— Madhav Kohli (@mvdhav) September 23, 2023

We noticed that the Illusion Diffusion tool was one of this week’s trending applications on Hugging Face, a website which hosts artificial intelligence tools. The tagline of the application reads, “Generate stunning high quality illusion artwork with Stable Diffusion.” In other words, illusion art can be created in the app with the help of stable diffusion.

When we tried to create similar artwork as the viral image with the help of this application, we achieved a similar result. This confirms that such pictures can be created with the help of this tool. Given below are a few examples of the renderings.

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The user who tweeted Rahul Gandhi’s picture also later added a disclaimer, stating that this tweet was a dig at those who shared the picture of Narendra Modi created with the help of artificial intelligence.

This photograph was clicked by a Australian Tourist in Colva beach, South Goa & it’s a ‘message to entire Planet Earth by mother Nature’. 🏞️

RT and share it maximum !! pic.twitter.com/Scmb3ugmP6

— Ductar Fakir 2.0 (@Chacha_huu) September 27, 2023

Alt News also noticed that the creator of the Illusion Diffusion application quote-tweeted a post by a contributor to this application, which showed how a life-like HD output could be generated using the input of a person’s face.

Thanks to @multimodalart Illusion Diffusion now has HD outputs

Please try it out again 🤩 https://t.co/3hYbYyqyHz

— AP (@angrypenguinPNG) September 19, 2023

To sum it up, a number of social media users mistakenly shared AI-generated images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi as real, believing it to be a miracle of nature.