Website or Claim Analysis
- braedensteele
- Apr 12
- 3 min read
Blog Post #3
For our third blog post, the class was instructed to evaluate a claim for truthfulness. For this post, I will evaluate an AI image that fooled me, and go through the steps I should have taken when I first saw the image. The image in question is of a protest in turkey that featured multiple people dressed as fictional characters, such as Pokemon's Pikachu, and DC Comics characters Batman and the Joker. For my analysis, I will be using the SIFT method to evaluate the image for its authenticity.
S - Stop
I come across this image while scrolling Twitter. The image would usually strike me as AI, if not for the fact that I saw a different video of someone dressed as Pikachu (Yellow animal-like character pictured) running away during Turkish protests. But I had not heard of characters dressed as Batman and Joker being there, suggesting that either I didn't see other pictures and videos related to the protests, or it may not be true.
I - Investigate
Who is "Nioh Berg?" The X/Twitter account of this person describes themselves as such in their bio: "Possibly the most famous Iranian Jew on 𝕏 | Advocate for Iranian Monarchy Restoration and Israel | Anti Woke | #17 most wanted by the regime in Iran." Looking them up brings up their X Account of course, and potentially the same account with a blog on SubStack, and an Instagram account. I would describe the account as very alt-right, very pro-Israel, and very anti-immigrant and anti-Islam. In my own personal life, most of the misinformation I see on social media platforms comes form right-wing accounts, so I definitely want to pursue this further. Because the source I first saw the image is untrustworthy, I now want to know exactly where the image came from, as Berg doesn't seem to make original content and instead uses videos and pcitures from other sources.
F - Find better sources
I search online for coverage of "Pikachu in Turkey Protests." At first my image doesn't show up, but other coverage of the event does. While searching, I found a USA Today article that confirms a protestor dressed as Pikachu was there, confirming the video I saw earlier and the story itself is not completely false, but I don't see mention of the photo I am looking for. After more scrolling, I see a webpage by the fact-checking website RumorGuard that shows a different image of Pikachu running that the site confirmed is AI. After reading the article, they mention the photo I saw, and they link to a separate fact check by Lead Stories that confirms my suspicions: the image is AI.
T - Trace the claim to the original context
The Lead Stories articles mentioned that their research showed the picture was posted March 27th by an online creator named Eren Fazlıoğlu. I look up his Twitter and I find the original post. In his bio as well, Eren specifies (in Turkish) that he is an artificial intelligence engineer. The post didn't appear to have any sort of explanation that it was AI, nor did his other posts, even though in his bio he does state he is an AI engineer.
Conclusion
This wasn't the way I treated the image when I first saw it, but how I should have treated it. I should have looked at the account that posted it, I should have been more wary of accepting things like this at face value, and I should have been more careful before I sent it to one of my friends as real. Now the image comes with added context that tells viewers it is fake, but it did not show that when I first saw it a few weeks ago.
AI has become frightening in how it is harder and harder to tell it apart from real photos the more advanced it gets. Using it alongside real stories and real images begins to blur what is real and not, and it becomes harder to tell what is the truth. I hope that you can see my mistake and how I should have gone about my initial experience with the image as a learning lesson, that anyone can be duped and fall victim to misinformation, as I did.
*Random note: the fact that I put "real photo" underneath it so dumb that I made myself laugh, then ponder how I could have been that stupid. Learning lesson in many ways for sure.
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