Does a composite image shared on social media authentically show two elderly brothers in 2025, holding a single surviving photo of them and their mom, Gracie, taken in 1952? No, that's not true: The composite image contained multiple inconsistencies that are characteristic of AI generated content. Two online AI detectors confirmed that.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on July 13, 2025. It opened:
In the top photo, taken in 1952, a young mother named Grace stands proudly in a field outside her small rural home, holding her twin boys, Samuel and Solomon. She had lost her husband in the Korean War just a year before, but she never let grief take her smile. Grace poured everything into raising her boys--working two jobs, teaching them kindness, strength, and the importance of sticking together.
She always said, 'As long as you two have each other, you'll never be alone.'But life wasn't easy. When the boys were only 12, Grace was diagnosed with cancer. She fought it fiercely but passed away just a year later. With no close family left, Samuel and Solomon were placed into the foster system--but they made a silent vow at her funeral: 'We'll never be apart.' And they never were.
The post continued:
Now, in 2025, the elderly brothers stand on the porch of their childhood home, which they saved every penny to buy back after retirement. They hold the only photo they have of their mother, the same one that sat on their nightstand every night since they lost her.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Screenshot taken by Lead Stories of Joshlilj Facebook post.)
A closer look at the two versions of what was said to be the same 1952 image, however, showed that they were not identical. The brothers look in different directions, one of the mom's eyes appears to be closed in the framed picture. The three white buttons have disappeared from her dress front and the density of the foliage in the background is not the same in the two images. Furthermore, in the framed picture, the mom's right hand demonstrates generative AI's commonly known difficulty in rendering human hands. It includes a massive index finger, middle finger shorter than the thumb and a blob of flesh where the other two fingers should be:
(Source: Facebook screenshots; composite image by Lead Stories)
Additionally, the hands of the brothers holding the image from the bottom strangely didn't show nails that were present on their hands holding the image from the sides:
(Source: Screenshot taken by Lead Stories of Joshlilj Facebook post.))
Two AI detectors, Hive Moderation and AI or Not, suggested that the composite image shared on Facebook was almost certainly created by AI:
(Source: Screenshot taken by Lead Stories of a hivemoderation.com web page.)
(Source: Screenshot taken by Lead Stories of aiornot.com web page.)
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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning AI generated content can be found here.
