Did old, never-before-seen photos surface in May of 2023 of Donald Trump posing with young women on a private jet, and also partying with Jeffrey Epstein? No, that's not true: Although there are authentic images of Donald Trump posing for pictures with young women and with Jeffrey Epstein, these three images surfaced on social media without any provenance or explanation of where they came from or what they show. The images show telltale signs of having been partly or entirely fabricated with an AI program such as Midjourney, leaving legs off Epstein in one case.
Two of the images were posted on the Finnish message board ylilauta.org on April 30, 2023. On that same day one of the two images was posted by @GravityVT on imgur.com, and by @walkingtalkk on 9GAG. On May 3, 2023, that photo was posted on Twitter and another copy of the image appeared on the subreddit r/AntiTrumpAlliance with a filter applied that made it look like a vintage digital camera display screen. On May 8, 2023, the two photos paired together as one was posted on Twitter (archived here) by @marlene4719. It was captioned:
This is creepy as f** k.
This is what the post looked like on Twitter at the time of writing:
Lead Stories uploaded the two images that were posted on ylilauta.org to the Hive Moderation AI-generated content detection tool. These images appeared to have the best resolution and may be originals. The scene (which appears on the right above) returned a score of 64.5 percent likely to be AI-generated and a .64 score (out of 1.00) that the image may have been created with Midjourney. This test was done again using a copy of the same image found on Twitter, and the likelihood of being AI generated dropped to only 41.1 percent.
The ylilauta.org copy of the image (the scene pictured on the left above) returned a score of 99.9 percent likely to be AI generated and a .99 score that the image was created with Midjourney. Lead Stories ran this test again using the image with the digital camera display screen overlay added to the image that was posted on Reddit, and this time the image scored 0 percent -- not likely to be AI generated and not made with Midjourney! This shows that the Hive moderation tool is not foolproof and that AI generated images that have received additional processing may not be detected by this tool. Lead Stories has yet to find a case of an authentic image mistaken for an AI generated image.
(Image source: Hive Moderation screenshots taken on Tue May 09 22:06:34 2023 UTC)
In the replies to the tweet by @marlene4719, another image appeared in the mix. This image shows likenesses of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein seated on a couch between two smiling young women. It was posted by @tolums1 (archived here) on May 8, 2023.
(Image source: Twitter screenshot taken on Tue May 09 21:17:23 2023 UTC)
This image had also been tweeted as a reply several times by @CWilson59399912 on May 7, 2023, including one instance (archived here) that had meme captioning added which said:
WHEN YOUR DATES
ARE YOUNG [sic] THAN YOUR TEENAGE DAUGHTER
Reverse image search with TinEye, Yandex, and Bing does not return any copies of this image from an earlier time. All copies returned by Google were posted on Twitter since May 7, 2023. If this photo was authentic, it would have value to tabloid media -- and for the photo to suddenly become public without any explanation is a clue that it is a 2023 fabrication. The image also appears in another form posted on Twitter (archived here) with a stronger color saturation (below right).
Lead Stories entered this image in the Hive Moderation AI generated content detection tool, and the tool did not determine that it was an AI generated image, giving a score of only a 4.1 likelihood of being AI generated. Running the test again on the super saturated version, the AI generated content detection tool dropped that rating to only a 1.6 percent likelihood of being AI generated. Examining the image with human eyes shows some clear deficits in the scene, most notably the absence of Epstein's legs, a head at the back of the couch, and an inexplicable number of hands at Epstein's shoulder. Some of the hands have the characteristic AI malformations that were present in recent versions of Midjourney.
(Image source: Lead Stories composite image with Twitter screenshots taken on Tue May 09 22:45:29 2023 UTC)
Lead Stories has published other fact checks regarding AI generated images of Donald Trump (here and here), Jeffrey Epstein and other notable people.
