Does an authentic photo show five men dancing while waving an Israeli flag as New York's World Trade Center towers burn in the background on September 11, 2001? No, that's not true: This photo was created using AI. Portions of the image are distorted, and a massive fireball appears to be in the sky beside the Twin Towers, not on or over them.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on August 14, 2024. Above the image of five men appearing to dance while waving an Israeli flag with the Twin Towers in the distance, the caption of the post said:
Never forget. Five dancing Israelis.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Aug 16 15:26:30 2024 UTC)
A Google Lens reverse image search (archived here) revealed an August 15, 2024, X post (archived here) from the verified account of BBC Verify journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh. He reposted the fake photo and wrote:
Never forget. Al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, and this is an AI-generated image.
An additional search on the X platform for the image in the post revealed this August 14, 2024, X post (archived here) where X verified social media user @CensoredMen said in the caption above the image:
Grok AI generates pretty accurate images.
Grok Image Generator is self-described as "an AI art generator that turns your text into a photorealistic image."
Below the post where user @CensoredMen implied the image was artificially generated was another X post (archived here) where @CensoredMen showed their use of the Grok Image Generator by creating a photorealistic image of what appeared to be two soldiers holding an Israeli flag and a bloodied certificate that read "most moral army," standing against a backdrop of a horrific scene of buildings on fire, blood on the ground, barefoot children in the streets and multiple soldiers and ambulances. The caption was "just testing grok ai."
There are clues in the image that is the focus of this fact check that the picture is not real -- the men's fingers appear abnormally elongated, and the ball of fire behind the Israeli flag appears to be in the sky beside the two World Trade Center towers.
Lead Stories also ran the video through True Media, an AI-detection tool, which found substantial evidence that it was created using AI.
(Source: True Media Screenshot taken on Wed Aug 21 13:06:30 2024 UTC)
Numerous historical accounts of the attacks on September 11, 2001, have described them as being the work of Islamic extremists. Encyclopedia Britannica says the coordinated effort was a "series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks committed in 2001 by 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda against targets in the United States, the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil in U.S. history."
When this fact check was written, Snopes had reviewed the same claim.
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning Israel are here. Lead Stories fact checks on claims related to the September 11, 2001, attacks are here.
