Following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election shared photos of Trump and Putin were distributed as if they were celebrating the election results together. “The first photos of Trump after the announcement of the results,” wrote a Russian-language Instagram page, “newsyakutska,” and posted photos. In these pictures, Trump and Putin are drinking wine. The same images were also posted by the Russian-language Instagram account “etorussia_detka” and an anonymous Facebook page titled “Wise Sayings.” From the comments on the posts, it seems that most users perceive the photos as real.
The photos of Trump and Putin are AI-generated and were initially published on January 9, 2024. Additionally, no information can be found about a meeting between Trump and Putin following the election.
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Photos of Trump and Putin are AI-generated
The circulating photos were created with the help of artificial intelligence, as evidenced by several details. For example, Putin’s wine glass has two stems, and his fingers look unnatural. Trump’s ear is not clearly outlined, and his hair unnaturally covers one of his ears.
The second photo shows that one of the wine glasses is missing a stem, the spoon and fork placed on the plate are fused together, and the food looks unnatural.
Both photos were initially posted on January 9, 2024, by the Instagram page nftplug as part of the series “AI CREATES A SCENARIO FOR DATE NIGHT INVOLVING PUTIN AND TRUMP.” The images were generated using artificial intelligence, specifically Midjourney. The description of nftplug notes that it posts content generated by artificial intelligence.
The photos have been circulating on social media since January 2024. They have been fact-checked by the German fact-checking platform CORRECTIV and the Serbian fact-checking platform istinomer. Additionally, there is no information available about any new meeting between them. In the past, they met in 2018 in Finland and in 2019 in Japan.
Mari Markhvaidze
Myth Detector Lab
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