Does a social media post show an authentic image of former President Donald Trump smiling at a cookout with Black supporters? No, that's not true: The image shows signs of being generated through artificial intelligence. The image also has not been featured in any legitimate online sources.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on May 23, 2024, on X, formerly Twitter. The post included an image of a smiling Trump surrounded by Black people smiling, and the post was captioned:
CNN will never report on this
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue May 28 16:03:41 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories used Google, Yandex and TinEye to search for the image online. We could not identify any credible sources that posted the image in a manner suggesting that it is legitimate. We also ran reverse image searches on Google, Yandex and TinEye of the portion of the image that focuses on Trump. None of the results were credible.
Evidence also shows that the image was generated through AI. Lead Stories processed the image through the Hive AI-image detector model and, as shown in the screenshot below, it determined that the image was almost certainly AI-generated.
(Source: Hive Moderation screenshot taken on Tue May 28 19:36:08 2024 UTC)
Many figures in the image have unnatural expressions and the details of their faces and bodies are too similar (i.e., everyone has the same teeth) or inexplicably out of focus for the otherwise clear image (i.e., it is difficult to tell how many fingers are on some of the hands).
There is no indication by the user who made this post on X that the image is not an actual photo of Trump and supporters.
Other Lead Stories fact checks related to Trump can be found here.
