Sonia Gandhi holding cigarette? No, viral photo is morphed using AI tool

A black-and-white photograph of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi holding a cigarette is being widely shared on social media.

Facebook user Sarvesh Kutlehria shared the image on July 12 with a caption in Hindi which said, “The person who recognizes it will get 8500 khata khat taka tak“. The post has received over 20,000 likes and 5,900 shares.

Several other users on Facebook and X shared the image with the same caption. Below are a few instances.

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Fact Check

We noticed a watermark at the bottom left corner of the viral image that read: “Remaker.” After conducting a Google search, we discovered that Remaker is an AI creative content generator. It enables users to swap faces in images and videos, allowing them to replace the face of the person in the original content with someone else’s face. This suggests that the viral image is an edited version of the original.

We ran a reverse image search on the viral image, leading us to a post shared on the microblogging website Tumblr in February 2013. The post carried an image which was the same as the viral image except the woman in the image did not appear to be Sonia Gandhi. Below the image, the caption read: “Ghazale Photographed By Farzad Sarfarazi, 2012”.

In the bottom right corner of this image, a copyright mark of the mentioned photographer can also be seen.

Several others have shared this image on several occasions attributing the image to Farzad Sarfarazi.

Hence, from the above findings, it can be concluded that the viral image has been edited using Remaker and the face of the woman in the original image had been swapped with Sonia Gandhi’s picture.