This viral image of Elon Musk and Arvind Kejriwal is AI-generated
A photo (here and here) of former Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal with Tesla founder Elon Musk is being shared on social media with a claim that Musk landed in India recently to meet Kejriwal and discuss Delhi’s administrative policies with a plan to adapt them in the US. Apparently, this photo was taken when Kejriwal met Musk to welcome him at the airport. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Recent photo of Arvind Kejriwal welcoming Elon Musk when he visited India to discuss Delhi’s administrative policies.
Fact: This is an AI-generated image. There are no news reports to validate the claim that Elon Musk visited India to meet Kejriwal to discuss Delhi’s administrative policies. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search to know whether Elon Musk had recently visited India to meet Arvind Kejriwal. However, we found no news reports on any such recent meeting. Also, we did not find any posts with photos resembling the viral one, either on Elon Musk or Arvind Kejriwal’s social media handles.
While observing the viral photo, we found a few inconsistencies. There is a weird bulge on Elon Musk’s left hand; his right-hand thumb finger looks odd. Musk’s teeth alignment also looks different compared to his actual photos. Such inconsistencies are found in images generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
To further verify this, we ran the image through AI Content detection tools like Hive and True Media. Both of them revealed in their Analyses that the image is AI-generated.
Further, we performed a reverse image search on the viral image to find out more about its origins. This search led us to a post made by an ‘X’ user named Piku (@RisingPiku) (a watermark of this username can be seen on the viral photo), who posted the same photo with the same claim as seen in the viral photo. Piku mentioned in her bio that she is an AI Enthusiast and Content Creator who posts AI-generated images (also on Instagram).
Replying to a user under this post, she said that this image was also generated using AI. There are many such AI generated images on ‘Piku’s’ X page, which you can find here, here, and here.
To sum up, an AI-generated image is being shared as a real photo of Arvind Kejriwal meeting Elon Musk for a discussion related to Delhi government’s policies.