A photo (here and here) purportedly showing the front page of UK-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph calling the Pakistan Air Force the “King of the Skies” is going viral on social media. The photo is being shared in the context of India–Pakistan tensions following Operation Sindoor. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This photo shows the front page of The Daily Telegraph’s 10 May 2025’s edition, which published a news story calling the Pakistan Air Force ‘The Undisputed King of the Skies.’
Fact: This is an AI-generated image and not a real front page of ‘The Daily Telegraph’ newspaper. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the authenticity of the viral photo, we performed a keyword search on the internet and found that ‘The Telegraph’—the online version of ‘The Daily Telegraph’—has not published the news calling the Pakistan Air Force the ‘King of the Skies.’ We also did not find any other reputed media organisation publishing such a piece of news.
Further, we found the E-paper of the 10 May 2025 edition of ‘The Daily Telegraph,’ which is available online (find the 12 May 2025 paper here). The 10 May 2025 edition did not contain the news headlines seen in the viral photo.
Apart from that, we also examined the viral news paper clip closely and found multiple inconsistencies when we compared it with the original front page of ‘The Daily Telegraph.’
Firstly, the design of the layout of the front page in the viral photo looks strikingly different from the original paper. The masthead in the viral photo is incomplete — the dateline lacks the year of publication, which is printed on the original front page of ‘The Daily Telegraph.’ Its position is also different from the original page, it is printed on the top left side above the logo. The URL printed below the logo reads “telegraph,cuk” instead of the correct “telegraph.co.uk”, a glaring error. Also, in the original paper, the URL is located at the top of the logo next to the dateline.
During this search, we found an original uncropped version (archive link) of the viral photo circulating online, in which there were several textual inconsistencies— the text was jumbled, nonsensical, and riddled with spelling errors, which are signs of AI-generated material.
To verify this, we ran the viral photo through AI content detection tools. WasItAI flagged it as highly likely to be AI-generated. Another tool, Decopy AI, scored it at 100%, reinforcing that it was created using generative AI. This confirms that the image is fake and does not represent a real front page published by The Daily Telegraph.
To sum up, an AI-generated image is being falsely shared, claiming to show a real front page of The Daily Telegraph praising Pakistan’s Air Force.
