Does a real photo show Kyle Rittenhouse in an office space with Lil Wayne? No, that's not true: The image was created with tools from OpenAI. It follows a trend of showing Lil Wayne in different places after he missed a concert in Bangor, Maine.
The claim appeared in a post made on X on July 2, 2026, by @rittenhouse2a, Rittenhouse's official account (archived here). The post was a quote post made in response to another post by a different account containing an AI-generated image of Lil Wayne (archived here). It contained an image of what appeared to be Lil Wayne sitting on a couch near Rittenhouse, and was captioned:
Enjoyed having Lil Wayne in the office yesterday!
This is what the image looked like:
(Image source: post by @rittenhouse2a on X.)
The image posted by Rittenhouse's account is AI-generated
On July 3, 2026, Lead Stories used the OpenAI Verify research tool (archived here), which identifies whether content contains "signals that it was generated with OpenAI tools." The tool concluded that the image contained an OpenAI SynthID (archived here), which is "an invisible watermarking technology, originated by Google and adopted by OpenAI, that embeds a signal directly into generated media." This verification is shown in the screenshot below:
(Image source: OpenAI Verify.)
On July 2, 2026, Rittenhouse's account later appear to acknowledge in posts that the image was AI-generated, found here (archived here) and on July 3, 2026, found here (archived here):
And AI Weezy doesn't look too thrilled 🤣
Background of AI-generated Lil Wayne images
The AI-generated images of Lil Wayne appear to be in response to his no-show at his scheduled performance in Bangor, Maine, on June 30, 2026 (archived here). The rapper apologized to fans in an Instagram story posted on July 1, 2026, and announced a rescheduled show in Bangor on July 28, 2026, but did not offer an explanation for his absence (archived here). He was spotted on July 1, 2026, at businessman Michael Rubin's annual white party (archived here). Lil Wayne's no-show has led to a social media trend of fake images of him in various locations (archived here).
More fact-checks
Other Lead Stories Fact Checks related to Rittenhouse can be found here, while Fact Checks related to Lil Wayne can be found here.
