A video featuring a series of four photos of a giant sword is going viral on social media. It is being claimed that the sword seen in these photos belongs to Kumbhakarna. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: These viral photos show Kumbhakarna’s sword from the Ramayana period.
Fact: These photos are all created by Artificial Intelligence(AI). There are no credible news reports about such a sword being found by the archeology department during any excavations. Hence, the claim made in the viral post is False.
To verify the viral claim, we performed an internet search using appropriate keywords. However, we did not find any credible reports about archaeologists discovering the sword of Kumbhakarna from the Ramayana period. If such a large ancient sword was indeed unearthed in excavations, it would have garnered significant media coverage. But, we did not find any such media reports.
Suspecting that the viral photos may have been generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), we ran the viral photos one by one on TrueMedia.org, a website that detects AI-generated images. Trumedia results showed that all these images were generated by AI technology. You can find the final reports of this analysis here, here, here, and here.
This makes it clear that the viral posts are just AI-generated images with a made-up story that this sword belongs to Kumbhakarna from the Ramayana period.
Furthermore, we also ran these images through Hugging Face’s ‘Maybe’s AI Art Detector’ tool to perform an additional analysis. This analysis also showed that the viral photos were created using Artificial Intelligence.
In the past, we have published articles debunking false claims on social media, which shared similar, hard-to-believe photos as visuals of real giant skulls unearthed in excavations. One set of photos was shared as real photos of strange creatures from ancient times. However, all of them were found to be AI-generated images. You can see these articles here and here.
Such similar rumours have gone viral in other countries as well. Recently, social media was filled with posts saying that a 3000-year-old, 50-foot-long sword had been unearthed during excavations in Turkey. However, these images were also AI-generated, according to ‘Snopes,’ a fact-checking organization. You can find their article here.
To sum up, images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) images are being shared as real photos of a Ramyana-era sword used by Kumbhakarna.
