The World Cup has officially kicked off, and with it so has a wave of AI-generated misinformation — ranging from fake fans in the stands, fabricated political appearances and false quotes attributed to players.
One viral image, which garnered more than 3 million views in one post on X, showed a football supporter resembling Adolf Hitler, who allegedly attended the Germany-Curaçao game on 14 June.
The image spread across Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Reddit, accompanied by posts in English, Spanish and Russian, some gaining thousands of views.
But in fact, it was digitally manipulated: a review of the original footage published by German broadcaster ARD shows that the real fan looked nothing like the one in the photo.
Processing the picture through OpenAI's image verification tool also revealed a SynthID watermark, which confirms that the photo "originated from OpenAI" and was therefore created or altered using artificial intelligence.
