Does a set of before-and-after pictures authentically depict Miley Cyrus in May, 2025? No, that's not true: No contemporaneous photo shows the singer looking like the cadaverous caricature shown in a social media post. Tools for detection of generative AI images show the image on the right was concocted using AI tools.
The images appeared in a May 1, 2025 X.com post (archived here) where it was published on the @MattWallace888 account under the title "What happened to Miley Cyrus?"
At the time this fact check was written, the post looked like this on X:
(Source: X.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
The "before" photo on the left has circulated online since 2010, when it was used to illustrate an article (archived here) about the singer's plans not to attend college.
Lead Stories submitted a screengrab of the image to the University of Buffalo's Deep-Fake-O-Meter to see if the image showed evidence of being altered by generative ai. Three image analysis tools on the Deep-Fake-O-Meter showed evidence it was the product of generative AI:
(Source: DeepFake-O-Meter screenshot taken by Lead Stories, with red arrows added to highlight still image analysis.)
Seeking corroboration, Lead Stories submitted the image to Google's reverse image search, which turned up no May, 2025 match to the photo used as the "after" image of Cyrus:
