A photo authentically shows a crowd welcoming Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz at a rally at Detroit Metro Airport on August 7, 2024.
The photo was real and taken by a staffer, according to the Harris-Walz campaign. The campaign said it did not digitally edit the photo or use AI to create it. However, the version of the image that later went viral appeared to have been slightly manipulated to exaggerate brightness and contrast.
In early August 2024, US Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate for the 2024 presidential election, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, campaigned in several swing states, including Michigan. Shortly after they landed in Detroit for a rally on August 7, many social media users posted a purported photo from the event – an image that purportedly showed a large crowd with an Air Force 2 in the background.
The photo also circulated on Facebook and Reddit. Some users seemed to believe the image was digitally altered (that is, someone took a real photo of the event and added or altered elements using software such as Photoshop) or the product of artificial intelligence (AI) software. One user commented under an X-post, “You can see it’s Photoshop.” Another commented under a different post, “Lol, you can see it’s a pure AI image.”
On August 11, former US President Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social that the image had been, as he put it, “edited using artificial intelligence” to make it appear as though there was a “huge ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
(@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social)
However, this was not the case. AI recognition software made it highly unlikely that the photo was created using AI. In addition, other photo and video evidence confirmed the size of the crowd, and according to the BBC, the Harris-Walz campaign confirmed that the original photo was genuine and taken by a member of their team.
What we know about the picture
In many AI-generated images, people appear to have non-human characteristics, such as extra or too few fingers or unrecognizable facial features. We could not see any evidence of this in the photo.
Nevertheless, we scanned the image using two online AI detection tools. The first, Winston AI Image Detector, found that the image was “96% human” – or that it was probably photographed by someone and not created using an AI generation tool. The results were as follows:
(Winston AI)
Isitai.com, another detection tool, described the image as “quite likely human-made” and estimated the probability that it was not AI at 58%.
(isitai.com)
Our initial attempts to trace the image’s origins via a reverse image search didn’t yield much viable evidence. Political strategist Rachel Bitecofer, who appears to have been one of the first social media users to share the image, told Snopes she wasn’t at the event and was “not sure” where she got the photo online.
We found many photos in The Associated Press photo archive showing a similar scene at Detroit Metro Airport. For example, an image by photojournalist Carlos Osorio shows a similar angle of the crowd, but with different lighting. We reached out to the AP to connect with Osorio to learn more. In the photos from AP and other media, a rooftop hangar casts shadows on the crowd — in other words, part of the crowd closer to the plane is visible and people under the roof are not as easy to spot. Additionally, many supporters were captured holding campaign signs, just like in the image in question.
If you zoom in on some of the phone screens in the image, you can see what looks like the plane and the crowd – in other words, the phones appear to show people recording what is happening in front of them. In the image below, you can see the plane’s fin on the participant’s phone:
(X-User @RachelBitecofer)
The BBC reported on August 12 that the original photo (see tweet below) was indeed real and taken by a Harris-Walz campaign staffer, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson confirmed. The campaign also said the photo was neither manipulated nor created using AI tools.
As photographer Patrick Witty noted, the differences between the original image and the version so widely shared on social media suggested that someone had cropped the image slightly and increased the color warmth and contrast before re-sharing it.
