Iranian security forces have been carrying out a deadly, unprecedented crackdown on anti-government protesters since January 8. Preliminary estimates of the number of demonstrators killed range from 6,000 – the current total of an ongoing count being carried out by NGOs – and 20,000, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Mai Sato. 

As our team observed by reviewing many videos filmed by eyewitnesses, the Kahrizak morgue in Tehran was flooded with hundreds of protesters’ bodies. According to partial counts carried out by the BBC and the NGO Human Rights Watch, the bodies of at least 200 to 400 demonstrators were brought to the site.

However, social media users and media outlets with links to the Iranian government began, the week of January 19, to explicitly deny that the massacres were taking place, claiming that the photos taken in the Kahrizak morgue were all generated by artificial intelligence. 

The Fars News Agency, which is linked to the Iranian regime, has tried to make this point by sharing two images of the same moving scene: a young woman in mourning standing amidst the many wrapped bodies laid out in the morgue’s courtyard.

The first image – on the right in the screenshot above – was taken from a tweet by Israeli journalist Emy Schrader. The wide shot shows a young woman standing amidst the bodies from a distance.  

The Fars News Agency said that the journalist had shared a “fake image” while claiming that “16,500 people had been killed in the riots”. The agency further claimed: 

“[The journalist] also used artificial intelligence to make her lie credible, but forgot to remove the Gemini AI label from the corner of the image”.

It is true that the image shared by Schrader was generated by artificial intelligence. You can see the logo for Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence, which is added to images produced by Nano Banana, the AI image generator included in Gemini. 

The second image is more zoomed in than the first and focuses on the woman in mourning. By including both images in the same post, Fars is saying that this closer up image is also fake. 

However, this way of presenting the images as both false is misleading. Although the first image was indeed AI-generated, the second is authentic. 

Using a fake image to discredit an authentic photo 

We were able to confirm that the first image – the one with the AI Gemini logo – was indeed generated by this tool by using the AI detection tool SynthID, which is integrated in the Google Lens search engine. When we uploaded this first image to Google Lens, it concluded that it was “created with Google AI” in the “about this image” section. 

The second image that the Fars News Agency claimed was false is actually authentic. It is from the Telegram account of an Iranian blogger who shared the photo along with others taken in the Kahrizak morgue. The choice to include this authentic photo alongside the AI-generated image and claim that both are false is part of a strategy to deny the real repression happening in Iran. 

Our team was able to verify the authenticity of a number of different videos from the Kahrizak morgue, some filmed in the same courtyard where the woman in the photo is standing. These videos helped us confirm that the scene captured in the photo did take place. Other videos and photos taken from different angles also show that there were many bodies laid on the ground of the morgue’s courtyard. 

This footage allows us to establish that the image of the woman in mourning was indeed taken at the Kahrizak morgue. Using a satellite image of the morgue that was provided to our team by the satellite image company Vantor, as well as two verified videos filmed in the courtyard of the morgue, it is possible to establish where the young woman was standing: in front of the entrance to a large building with a red roof. A brown-and-beige wall appears in both videos and the photo. Moreover, a white building in the background of the photo of the young woman can be seen in the satellite image.

Manipulative discourse 

It is likely that the AI-generated image was produced using the authentic photo, as the woman in the AI-generated image appears very similar to the woman in the real image.

However, it seems as if the Fars News Agency was using the AI-generated image to also discredit the authentic image and, thus, the reality of the massacres believed to have been committed by the Iranian security forces. Implying that all photos of the Kahrizak morgue are false because some false images have been circulating is a manipulative narrative that the Iranian authorities are using to try to discredit any accounts of their brutal crackdown.

This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.