Amid news reports regarding pothole-ridden roads in Gujarat (here, here, and here), a photograph (here and here) showing large waterlogged potholes on the road is being shared on social media, claiming it to be from Gujarat. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This photo shows an extremely damaged road in Gujarat full of potholes.
Fact: This is an AI-generated image. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we looked for news reports about this photo but found none. If a road in such poor condition, ridden with large potholes, had been really noticed in Gujarat, mainstream media or at least the local media would have reported. But that is not the case here; there were no news reports about any such pothole-ridden road as seen in the viral post.
Further, observing the photograph clearly, we noticed a few visual anomalies generally found in AI-generated images. The faces of a few people in the photo look distorted and unreal. One child looks like he is stuck on the asphalt road. The front tyre of a couple sitting on a bike looks unrealistically thin. Also, from the angle at which the photo looks like it was taken, the torso of the pillion rider should not be visible as much as it is seen in this photo.
Furthermore, we ran the photo through an AI-content detection tool known as Hive. According to this tool, there is a 100% likelihood that the viral photo was created using AI.
Even Hugging Face’s AI image detector rated the image 99% artificial.
To sum up, an AI-generated Image is falsely being shared as a real photo of a pothole-ridden road in Gujarat.
