An image of Spanish footballer Lamine Yamal grinning widely with the World Cup tucked under his arm and a Palestinian flag draped over his shoulders has garnered millions of views on social media. It turns out, however, that the image is a fake. The image, first posted the night after Spain won the 2026 FIFA World Cup, has been picked up and shared by a wide variety of accounts. Just one X post featuring the image – a post by Palestinian journalist Mohamed Al Masri – had garnered more than 1.9 million views by late afternoon on July 20.
In this July 20 X post, a pro-Palestinian journalist shares an AI-generated image of football player Yamine Yamal draped in a Palestinian flag. © X / Mohamed Al Masri
The photo has also circulated widely on Facebook. An image generated with the help of ChatGPT However, this image of Yamal was created using ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot owned by the company OpenAI. SynthID, Google's tool to identify AI-generated content, was able to detect that the image contains a hidden watermark showing that it was generated by “OpenAI’s tools”, i.e. ChatGPT.
In this screenshot, SynthID detects that this image was created using ChatGPT. © OpenAI
SynthID was originally created to detect images generated using Nano Banana, Google’s AI image generator. Now, it can also detect images generated by ChatGPT. To check an image, you just upload it to OpenAI’s verification site. The AI-generated image was made using a real photo of Lamine Yamal originally published by Spanish newspaper El País in their live feed covering the World Cup final. You can see that his smile is the same, as is his grasp on the World Cup trophy. His headband is the same, too.
