Did California Governor Gavin Newsom post fake photos of National Guard troops sleeping on a hard floor during their deployment to the Los Angeles riot zone in June of 2025, as a social media post claimed? No, that's not true: The post provides no evidence the images were AI-generated, other than a set of red arrows overlaid without explanation and pointing to unremarkable details. The photos Newsom posted were published by the San Francisco Chronicle as part of its exclusive June 9, 2025 report about the lack of beds and other facilities for National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles. Online tools designed to detect AI-created images did not rate the image a generative AI concoction.
The claim was made in a June 9, 2025 X.com post addressed to Newsom (archived here) by @CcpSkipTracer under the caption "Fire your social media manager." It continued:
Your AI is as deplorable as your leadership.
Here's what the post looked like at the time this fact check was written:
(Source: X.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
No explanation or evidence was given with the declaration that the image, which originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, was manufactured by AI. The claim was reposted by several other X.com users, including Trump advisor Laura Loomer (archived here), with the comment "Democrats love lying."
The Chronicle did not credit the photo to a staff photographer, instead noting the image was "obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle" as part of an exclusive story in which an anonymous source complained that the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles was poorly planned, with no provision of housing or food for troops when they arrived.
Lead Stories examined the version on the Chronicle website, which was published at a higher resolution, and found none of the mangled letters, extra fingers or proportion distortions that sometimes give away AI images. That crisper version is shown below:
To check our observations, Lead Stories submitted the image to HIVE Moderation, one of the leading "AI Sniffers" are used to detect inauthentic images, video and audio.
HIVE's suite of detectors found no substantial evidence the image was made up by an AI image generator:
(Source: HIVEmoderation.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
Similarly, the University of Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab's tool showed little likelihood the image was AI generated.
The four red arrows added to the blurry photo posted by @CcpSkipTracer don't appear to call attention to anything unusual.
One arrow points to the head of a troop sleeping on their right side, with what appears to be their left hand tucked up under their head, as seen in this zoomed-in snip of the higher-resolution image:
(Source: SFChronicle.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
On the left side of the image, where a troop lays on their back, the red arrow seems to point to their left-turned head, seen in this zoomed-in snip of the higher-resolution image:
(Source: SFChronicle.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
In the center of the image, two arrows point to troops sleeping in a pile of rucksacks and other gear. The arrows point to the partially-obscured heads of two sleepers, as seen in this zoomed-in snip of the higher-resolution image:
(Source: SFChronicle.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
The post alleging Newsom posted a concocted image may have arisen from a separate - debunked by Lead Stories - claim made in a separate post about the images published by The Chronicle. A social media user submitted the images to ChatGPT, which reported one had been online since August of 2021 as part of a set of images the US military shared of withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. ChatGPT gave a highly specific website location for the image, but when Lead Stories went to that site there was no copy of the sleeping troops image. Chat GPT was either mistaken or hallucinated its analysis, as sometimes happens.
Lead Stories submitted the sleeping troops image to Google's reverse image searching tool and found no version of the image had been posted online before June 9, 2025, when the San Francisco Chronicle posted it.
Readers who'd like more Lead Stories fact checks on the Los Angeles riots of 2025 will find them here.
