A widely shared image that appears to show a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer fatally shooting Alex Preti in Minneapolis over the weekend has been enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI).
The image resembles a still from a real video of the incident, but AI was used to enhance the screen capture, creating an image in which the ICE officer’s head and hands were missing, and his legs blended into the gun on the ground.
Image shared [warning: distressing content] Thousands of times online.
Authentic video from the scene, verified by news outlets, shows Preti lying on the ground next to a federal agent holding a handgun. However, the details of this moment in the original video (around 1:03 of this video) are blurred.
The images shared are enhanced using AI, and many of the common shapes match blurry real-world video footage. However, the AI incorporated some hallucinations when trying to enhance the still image, resulting in missing and deformed body parts of the ICE agent kneeling on the ground.
The video shows the bottom of a man’s boot in the bottom left corner, but in the AI-enhanced version, it has been transformed into what looks like a jagged piece of rock or a chunk of muddy ice. An ICE officer in a beanie holding a handgun places his hand where the kneeling officer’s head should be, but the kneeling officer has no visible hands.
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in digital forensics, misinformation and image analysis and is chief scientific officer at GetReal Security, told AFP that the images were real video frames enhanced with AI.
Former Sky News presenter Kay Varley also shared the photo on X, calling it a “deeply disturbing image”, but later responded to a tweet claiming it was AI-generated, saying: “Words matter, just like the difference between a photo and an image.”
Federal and state authorities in the United States have presented conflicting versions of what happened in the moments leading up to the shooting. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly said Preti was shot because he was “brandishing” a gun, but local authorities deny this and say he was shot after his legally registered firearm was taken from him.
Before you share an image you see during a breaking news event on social media, consider whether it’s real. Toolkits and guides for discovering AI can help.
