Claim: A female American soldier is looking to connect with people online on Threads.
Fact: The image of the female American soldier is AI-generated.
On 12 May 2024, a Threads account shared an image of an American female soldier with the caption: “Hello, Lets chat on Instagram”. Receiving more than 17,800 views and hundreds of interactions, Threads users attempted to interact with the account, believing that it belonged to the soldier in the image.
Fact or Fiction?
Upon close inspection, Soch Fact Check discovered that the image bears the hallmarks of AI manipulation. The woman’s hands are unnaturally set on her thighs, and one of her eyes is also reflecting the light in a different way from the other eye.
We also surveyed the Threads account and found various posts where the account is claiming to be a doctor or a different American female soldier. There are also numerous, unlabelled images of several white women with captions such as “I am single”, “I am 22 year old”, “Good afternoon”, “Let’s chat on Instagram”, “Good night”, and others. A series of such images are posted every day or so, and it appears that the account itself is linked to an AI-model trained to upload random AI-generated images of women with captions eliciting a response from the audience.
This Threads account is also linked to another Instagram account, which does not include a single image of any women but seems to belong to a man, who uploads TikTok-style videos of himself dancing to Hindi songs and poetry.
We also uploaded the image of the female soldier to an AI-image detector, and it generated a report claiming that the image was 71.89% AI and 26.11% human.
Virality
This Threads account has more than 241,000 followers. And the post in the claim has been viewed more than 17,800 times, receiving more than 500 interactions.
Conclusion: An image of a female American soldier soliciting conversation online is AI-generated.
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Background image in cover photo: WIRED
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