The story originated from a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, where it was published on August 10, 2024, under the caption:
The Harris/Walz rally last night had an electricity that I've never seen before. The right hates this.
This is how it appeared at the time of this writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Aug 12 14:15:10 2024 UTC)
The post implied that the image, with its poorly-rendered faces and hands, authentically showed attendees at a rally held by the Harris campaign. The picture quickly went viral, and many -- for example, here (archived here) -- wrote on social media that her campaign was "CAUGHT USING FAKE AI RALLY PHOTOS".
The claim spread in multiple languages, including Spanish (archived here), Chinese (archived here), Arabic (archived here), Japanese (archived here), Russian (archived here) and Greek (archived here). Among those who shared the image were prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (archived here); former New York congressman George Santos (archived here); and an English-language account (archived here) of a person once affiliated (archived here) with organizations of the Russian ministry of foreign affairs.
Although not every single AI-detection tool used by Lead Stories for this fact check was able to identify the image of the crowd as inauthentic, the image contains multiple telling signs seen with bare eyes that reveal the picture did not capture a real-life scene. One woman in the first row had an elvish triangular-at-the-top ear. A man in the third row wore partially invisible eyeglasses blending with his cap and piercing his ear and had an unnatural number of arms. All inscriptions on clothing items were gibberish, and many faces in the background were badly distorted, with a few that appeared to float in the air detached from human bodies.
The image lacked any details tying the crowd specifically to a Harris campaign event. For example, there were no Harris-Walz posters typically seen at those rallies. The picture did not include anything identifying the date and the place of the supposed event, either.
A Google reverse image search (archived here) did not produce any matches indicating that the Harris campaign ever posted the image.
The picture in question wasn't seen in the official campaign collection of photographs available on the campaign website.
Lead Stories manually checked the official campaign's accounts on X (archived here), Facebook (archived here) and Instagram but, as of this writing, the picture wasn't there. It did not appear on the rapid response time account (archived here), either.
On August 10, 2024, the Harris campaign account published a set of different still images (archived here).
Several hours after the AI-generated picture of crowds appeared online, the account that first uploaded it -- @sarcasmcat24 -- wrote (archived here):
That's a photo that I generated with AI
Zoom in a bit, you'll see that the faces aren't even well developed.
Yeah, I run a parody account, glad you enjoyed the post! 😜
The account went on to say (archived here) that the low quality of the "photo" was supposed to give a clue that it was not authentic.
Lead Stories contacted the Harris campaign regarding the post.
The campaign said they only comment on claims about things the campaign actually posts.
Claims of photo manipulation have become a feature of the Harris vs. Trump contest.
On August 11, 2024, Donald Trump's account on Truth Social speculated (archived here) that another image of a Harris rally featuring a plane in the background was not real. The Harris campaign denied the accusations (archived here) and said that its photo was authentic. Lead Stories found that the photo with the plane was not digitally manipulated.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims about the 2024 U.S. presidential election can be found here.
