Did UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph publish a story headlined "Pakistan Air Force: The Undisputed King Of The Skies"? No, that's not true: A viral image showing such a title has been fabricated, no such article appeared on the website of The Daily Telegraph. The image contained several mistakes that are indicative of the use of AI tools, such as odd spellings and weird letters.
An example of the image could be seen in a post on X (archived here) published on May 10, 2025 with a caption that read:
British edition of the Daily Telegraph.
The Pakistan Air Force is the undisputed king of the skies.
However a search for stories with the phrases "king of the skies" and "Pakistan" on the website of the Daily Telegraph returned no results (archived here). A similar search on Google News did not bring up such an article either (archived here), but it did bring up a fact check from Newschecker that also looked into the image.
Several AI detection tools found traces of AI use in the image
AI detection tool Hive gave the image a 19.1% score:
AI detection tool Sightengine however said there only was a 4% chance the image was AI-generated:
Lead Stories also ran the image through AI detection tools at the University at Buffalo's Media Forensic Lab, which focuses on "the forensic analysis of digital media." Together, these tools are called the DeepFake-O-Meter. Several of the tools indicated it was at least somewhat likely to be AI generated:
Several clues in the image revealed it was probably generated using AI, for example the non-existent domain name "telegraph,cuk", the odd price, several misspelled words and the use of some very odd letters, some of which do not exist in the Latin alphabet used by The Daily Telegraph.
(Image source: downloaded from the @SprinterObserve account on X, annotations by Lead Stories)
