Did a man named Brian Thompson from Romford, U.K., die in an ambulance after "anti tax activists" blocked the roads with "Lamborghini tractors"? No, that's not true: The image of the supposedly deceased man on social media was AI generated. In fact, the photo came from the face-generating website This Person Does Not Exist.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on December 12, 2024. It said:
RIP Brian Thompson from Romford. Yesterday the grandfather of four died in the back of an ambulance after it was held up by anti tax activists blocking the roads with £100,000 Lamborghini tractors. Gone but you will never be forgotten. 🎗️. .
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Dec 13 18:52:32 2024 UTC)
The image of "Brian Thompson from Romford" did not contain discrepancies immediately suggesting that algorithms generated the picture. However, a closer examination showed that the two sides of the man's blue shirt appeared to have been made from a different material: The part of the collar on the left seemed to be too soft to stand vertically like the part on the right.
A Google reverse image search showed that the image of the same man appeared in the comment section of a plant-selling website under a different name: "Jacob C."
(Source: Plantpico screenshot taken on Fri Dec 13 19:27:06 2024 UTC)
A reverse image search via the PimEyes paid face recognition tool showed that the image of the man came (archived here) from the face-generating website named "This Person Does Not Exist":
(Source: This Person Does Not Exist screenshot taken on Fri Dec 13 19:34:19 2024 UTC)
The website's description (archived here) reads in part, as translated from Italian to English by Google Translate:
An interesting point is that creating photos of non-existent people was a by-product: the main goal was to train the AI to recognize faces and fake faces in general.
Lead Stories ran the image through the TrueMedia nonprofit AI detection tool, and it found "substantial evidence" (archived here) pointing to AI. (TrueMedia adds human analysis to its reports and labels analyses "Unverified" until a human analyst has also examined the content.)
A search on Google News across December 2024 results for the keywords seen here (archived here) -- narrowed down to explicitly exclude news articles about the UnitedHealthcare CEO of the same name who was killed in Manhattan (archived here) on December 4, 2024 -- produced zero results confirming the claim reviewed in this fact check.
A broad search on Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) for articles about anti-tax activists and Romford didn't show a single report.
The image of the "Brian Thompson from Romford" was posted by an account (archived here) that describes itself as a lawyer. In another post purporting to show professional correspondence (archived here), the account gave a U.K. address. However, Lead Stories found no people of this name among solicitors or barristers in the U.K. According to TrueMedia (archived here), that account's profile picture on X was likely to have been generated by AI, too.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims mentioning the U.K. can be found here.
