Does a high resolution image of the scuffle between immigration officers and Alex Pretti provide a more clear picture of what happened just before Pretti was shot? No, that's not true: This AI-enhanced image was created from an extremely blurry still taken from a video. AI-hallucinated flaws appear as crisp visual details where the original image was indistinct. The resulting image includes an ICE agent with no head and no hands, a boot rendered as a chunk of ice, and a pile of metal objects under an agent. The addition of a clear rendering of a hand with a wedding band demonstrate this image is not reliable visual evidence of what was happening at that particular moment.
The AI-enhanced image appeared in a post (archived here) published on X by @TonyT2Thomas on Jan. 25, 2026. The post contained a retweet of a Jan. 24, 2026 post (archived here) by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller which was captioned with the words:
A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.
This is the image included in the @TonyT2Thomas post:
(Image Source: Lead Stories screenshot from x.com/TonyT2Thomas/status/2015629593265250810.)
The video footage in question is believed to have been filmed by a woman wearing a pink coat who appears in other videos taken from across the street on which the shooting occurred. Many copies of this footage have been enhanced with various brightening and sharpening tools. Lead Stories chose the 2-minute, 50-second copy attributed to her posted on X (archived here) on Jan. 24, 2026 by Drop Site News. That version of the video appears not to have been enhanced. In the Lead Stories composite image below, the left frame shows the moment in question, which is 1 minute, 3 seconds in. The center frame shows the dark and blurry zoomed-in detail taken from that moment in the video. The frame on the right shows the AI-generated output with several flaws hallucinated by the AI.
(Image Source: Lead Stories composite image with screenshots from https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2015131503622021472 and x.com/TonyT2Thomas/status/2015629593265250810.)
Lead Stories made a GIF by overlaying the detail still with the AI-enhanced image. The AI version shows the ICE agent kneeling next to Alex Pretti has no head. He also has no hands. Resting in the area where the kneeling agent's head should be is the other agent's hand -- rendered in such detail that it is possible to make out a wedding band. This detail is a hallucination. An article from IBM's website (archived here) describes AI hallucinations:
AI hallucination is a phenomenon where, in a large language model (LLM) often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool, perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.
Generally, if a user makes a request of a generative AI tool, they desire an output that appropriately addresses the prompt (that is, a correct answer to a question). However, sometimes AI algorithms produce outputs that are not based on training data, are incorrectly decoded by the transformer or do not follow any identifiable pattern. In other words, it "hallucinates" the response.
Below is Lead Stories' GIF, which alternates the screenshot from the video with the AI-enhanced image:
(Image Source: Lead Stories GIF with screenshots from https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2015131503622021472 and x.com/TonyT2Thomas/status/2015629593265250810.)
Comments on social media regarding this AI-enhanced video still frame have had a variety of takeaways -- some people think the photo shows a gun in Pretti's hand before he was shot. Frame-by-frame review of original videos taken of the scuffle established that, at the moment pictured, Pretti had already been disarmed by another ICE agent (not pictured here) who was wearing a grey coat. Lead Stories published an analysis on Jan. 24, 2026 focusing on three videos which show the incident from several angles, including screenshots of the ICE agent disarming Pretti before the shooting began.
The Lead Stories composite image below shows some of the AI-generated hallucinations which found their way into this image enhancement. For comparison these are paired with details from the original blurry video still.
(Image Source: Lead Stories composite image with screenshots from https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2015131503622021472 and x.com/TonyT2Thomas/status/2015629593265250810.)
