A photo of Iran’s bombed schoolgirl graveyard went around the world. Was it real, or AI? (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/world@lemmy.world

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The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town’s young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll.

But is it real?

Ask Gemini, the AI service powered by Google, and the answer you receive is no – in fact, Gemini claims the photograph is from two years earlier and more than 2,000km (1,240 miles) away. Rather than graves for small girls killed by a missile, the image “depicts a mass burial site in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey” after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck in 2023. “This specific aerial perspective became one of the most widely shared images of the disaster,” Gemini says, “illustrating the sheer scale of the loss.”

The cemetery image, it turns out, is authentic. Researchers have cross referenced the photo of the site with satellite images that confirm its location, and it can be cross-referenced again with dozens more images taken of the same site from slightly different angles, and again with video footage – none of which experts say show signs of tampering or digital manipulation. The “factchecks” by Gemini and Grok are just one example of a tidal wave of AI-generated slop – hallucinated facts, nonsense analysis and faked images – that are engulfing coverage of the Iran war. Experts say it is wasting investigative time and risks atrocities being denied – as well as heralding alarming weaknesses as people increasingly rely on AI summaries for news and information.

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[-] JoeMontayna@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 month ago

Does it matter? It happened, and has been widely confirmed.

[-] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago

the news story is about how LLMs are resulting in people being fed false "fact-checks", being told the image is fake when it's not

it's not strictly about whether the image is real or not, which the facts are clear about

[-] JoeMontayna@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Ok good point.

[-] village604@adultswim.fan 2 points 1 month ago

It absolutely matters if AI images of war are being passed off as real.

Misinformation and propaganda were already a huge issue and AI just ramped it up.

this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026

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