Does a real selfie photo show basketball star LeBron James posing in a mirror while wearing a French maid costume at a "Diddy party"? No, that's not true: AI detection tools and a human analyst found there was "substantial evidence of manipulation" in this image. It was likely generated with AI.
The image of James, pro basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers, appeared in a post (archived here) on X on September 21, 2024. It was captioned:
'Ain't no party like a Diddy party'
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Sep 26 15:34:32 2024 UTC)
This image surfaced shortly after Sean "Diddy" Combs was arrested on September 16, 2024, on charges of alleged racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.
Lead Stories uploaded the link of this image to TrueMedia.org to get aggregated insights from tools designed to detect manipulated and AI-generated images. The Universal Fake Detector Analysis tools returned a 95-percent confidence rating that the image was AI-generated (see full report here). In addition, a human analyst verified the TrueMedia.org verdict: "substantial evidence of manipulation."
(Source: Truemedia.org screenshot taken on Thu Sep 26 15:44:32 2024 UTC)
This image had already circulated online earlier this year. The earliest copy Lead Stories found was in a post by @MattWallace888 on or before April 27, 2024. The post is now deleted from X. A screenshot linking to Wallace's tweet was posted that day on Telegram (archived here) by @redpillboy (pictured below).
(Source: Telegram screenshot taken on Thu Sep 26 19:23:01 2024 UTC)
The caption included with the more recent X post, "Ain't no party like a Diddy party," is a reference to what James said (at 1:23 minutes into this April 12, 2020, copy posted on YouTube) during an appearance on an Instagram Live fundraiser hosted by Combs in 2020. The obscure video clip resurfaced on TikTok on March 28, 2024, and has since been featured in several tabloid articles -- The U.S. Sun (archived here) and the New York Post (archived here) published articles on September 25 and 26, 2024, respectively.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks of claims involving LeBron James or Sean "Diddy" Combs can be found here and here.
