Image of Bono and Bob Geldof holding Israeli flags is AI generated – Full Fact

An image purportedly showing singers Bono and Bob Geldof holding Israeli flags was generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Post shared on social mediaamong others by a Greek politician and economist Yanis Varoufakisincludes a screenshot of a post on X (formerly Twitter), which is headlined: “BREAKING: Bono and Bob Geldof stage two-man vigil outside Israeli embassy in Dublin.”

The bio for the X account which apparently originally posted the photo on December 16, describes itself as offering “fake news and topical satire.” ONE post on December 18 from the same account confirmed that the photo was “fake”.

The person behind the account also told fact-checkers at Ireland The journal that “the image was created by Grok AI and the tweet is satire”.

Grok is it generative AI chatbot created by Elon Musk’s startup, xAI. It allows users to generate realistic images from text prompts and is integrated on X.

Varoufakis later wrote on X: “Friends tell me this photo of Bono with an Israeli flag is fake. I hope it is. For his sake. (It would help if he made a statement).

There are several other clues that suggest the image has been generated by AI. The Israeli flag, Mr. Geldof holds, is wrong. It must have one white background with two horizontal blue stripes and a central Star of David— but in the picture it has two more vertical blue stripes.

The fingers of Mr. Geldof’s right hand is also slightly distorted. As we’ve written before, AI image generators often have a particularly hard time replicating fingers.

Beyond this, there is no evidence that the singers staged a vigil outside the Israeli embassy in Dublin.

This week Israel announced it will close its embassy in Dublin over “the Irish government’s extreme anti-Israel policy”. But there is no credible media reports that Bono or Mr. Geldof has staged such a vigil at the embassy.

Full Fact has reached out to representatives for both singers and will update this article if we receive a response.

We’ve previously written about a number of fake articles and quotes about public figures that were originally created by satirical social media accounts and websites, but have since been widely shared online as if they were real, and taken by some quite seriously.

We’ve written more about why we actually check these kinds of claims here.

For more advice on how to view AI-generated images, read our guide.