Does a viral image authentically document President Donald Trump's efforts to clear the rubble at the 9/11 site? No, that's not true: Three online tools said it was generated by AI. In particular, one tool detected an invisible watermark identifying the image's AI origin.
The claim appeared in an article (archived here) on patriots.win, published on Sept. 11, 2026. It read:
God bless President Donald John Trump 🙌✝️🇺🇸
This is what the post looked like on patriots.win at the time of writing:
(Image source: patriots.win.)
Hive Moderation said that the image was 99.9% likely to be a product of generative AI:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Sightengine, another AI detection tool, reached the same conclusion:
(Image source: Sightengine.)
Lead Stories submitted the picture to the OpenAI verification tool that searched for the SynthID watermark (archived here), an invisible signal embedded by Google AI tools to identify AI-generated content. Here is the conclusion:
(Image source: OpenAI.)
A reverse image search (archived here) didn't show that the picture was published by any credible news outlets that covered 9/11 and its consequences.
