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IMAGES HAVE BEEN shared online this week that appear to show deceased child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alive alongside claims he is in Israel, but they are fake.
The images have been shared widely on social media, including on X, Facebook and Instagram.
They show a bearded Epstein walking on a city street.
There are a number of AI-generated or altered images doing the rounds online, but the most common ones are based on real photos of Epstein.
“Epstein is walking around Israel free,” one post on X shared on 9 February and shared 1,500 times reads.
That post features the two images. One is an altered version of a real photo of Epstein that was taken near his New York home in 2015. The photo featured in an article published by the Daily Mail.
The beard and long hair have been added to that original photo.
The other image in the X post is an altered version of a still from a 2020 documentary about Epstein called Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich.
Another image that appears to show Epstein in Tel Aviv is likely entirely AI-generated.
It has been shared widely on Instagram and Facebook.
The image appears to show Epstein with a long beard and hair wearing sunglasses.
He is flanked by what look like a pair of bodyguards.
It may deceive some people at first glance but there is too much movement blur on the faces of the men either side of Epstein, which is a feature of AI images and videos.
Image blurring on movement tends to be exaggerated in AI imagery compared to real photos and videos.
When uploaded to Gemini, Google’s AI model, the chatbot returns a verdict that it was created with AI.
“This image was created or edited with Google AI,” Gemini replied.
“Analysis of the image reveals a SynthID watermark, which is an imperceptible digital signature used to identify content generated or altered by Google’s AI tools,” it said.
Another image that appears to show Epstein in Tel Aviv is also AI-generated or altered.
There are some telltale signs that it is not authentic, such as the gibberish on the street signs and the way the bodies of Epstein and the two men he is with are rendered.
They overlap, appearing to share the same space and some versions of the image even carry the Gemini logo in the bottom-right corner, which has been cropped out in many instances where it has been shared on social media.
Jeffrey Epstein died on 10 August 2019 in a New York jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
A coroner ruled he died by suicide.
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