Viral Putin, Modi and Xi selfie at BRICS summit is AI-generated

A viral selfie allegedly showing Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and other leaders together at the BRICS summit in New Delhi is AI-generated. A SynthID watermark shows it was created using OpenAI tools, while several leaders pictured, including Brazil’s Lula and Turkey’s Erdogan, did not attend. Another AI selfie features former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, who died in 2024. Both images were widely shared online, including by official embassy accounts. Vedika Bahl fact-checks.

This story was originally reported by France 24. As an automated real-time news aggregator, NewsToolBar provides multi-perspective indexing and AI summarization while directing full readership directly to primary publisher sources.