Image of hands for sale as meat in grocery store is AI-generated | Fact check
The claim: Image shows human hands for sale as meat
A March 21 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) shows what appears to be marbled red meat in the shape of human hands for sale in a grocery store.
“Human Meat On The Market!” the post reads.
The post was shared more than 6,000 times in six days.
More from the Fact-Check Team: How we pick and research claims | Email newsletter | Facebook page
Our rating: Altered
The image was digitally created and includes elements consistent with AI-generated imagery, three experts told USA TODAY.
Telltale signs of AI generation throughout image
Three experts speaking to USA TODAY independently highlighted two elements in the image that indicated it was generated with AI.
The most obvious was the number of fingers on the hands. Several hands in the image have fewer than five fingers. AI struggles to put the correct number of fingers on images, said Michelle Johnson, a journalism professor emerita at Boston University.
The other unanimously recognized tell was the nonsensical labels on the packages in the image. Walter Scheirer, an engineering professor at Notre Dame whose area of research includes visual recognition, called the labels “the gibberish output of a generative AI algorithm.”
“While such algorithms can do a good job rendering photorealistic scenes, they have trouble with readable text synthesis,” he said in an email to USA TODAY. “Further, the labels are also distorted and fuzzy in places, which wouldn’t be the case if the text was printed in the physical world.”
Fact check: Image of Donald Trump leading crowd down flag-lined street is AI-generated
Britt Paris, an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers, noted that beyond the issues with text and hands, the lighting is unrealistic in the image.
“There are many weird streaks of light and reflections at various depths, seemingly reflecting off of many different planes of varying depth between the ‘hands’ and the camera,” she wrote in an email.
The Facebook post contains the earliest version of the image USA TODAY could find after using multiple reverse image search engines, and the user is identified as a “digital creator.”
USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the claim for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Our fact-check sources:
Britt Paris, March 26, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Walter Scheirer, March 26, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Michelle Johnson, March 26, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or e-newspaper here.
USA TODAY is a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, which requires a demonstrated commitment to nonpartisanship, fairness and transparency. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Meta.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Image of human hands in grocery store created with AI | Fact check
