Lighthouse Journalism came across pictures of Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and his wife pictured in white clothes. It was claimed that Ronaldo along with his wife has accepted the Islam religion. During the investigation we found that the images are AI-generated. The viral claim is false.
Claim:
X user Adv Nazneen Akhtar shared the images on her profile.
Other users too are sharing the same images with similar claims.
Investigation:
We started our investigation by observing the pictures. We saw that the background of the images was blurry. Also, AI-generated images are bad compared to human images and usually get the image of the hands wrong. We observed in one image that Ronaldo had six fingers.
On running a reverse image search we found the separate images instead of a collage on a Facebook page.
HIVE Moderation, an AI detector gave the results about two images that were AI generated.
We then ran the images through Illuminarty, another AI image detector. The detector too suggested that the images are AI generated.
We also checked if there were any news reports to back the claim in the post, we could not find any.
Conclusion: The viral images of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and his wife being shared with the claim that he and his wife accepted Islam are AI-generated. The viral claim is false.
