Fact Check: Image claiming National Geographic Award-winning photograph of the year is AI generated
National Geographic is the official journal of the National Geographic Society, one of the world’s largest nonprofit
Whale and Moon
National Geographic is the official journal of the National Geographic Society, one of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational institutions. It is the first magazine to reproduce color photographs. The magazine is also known to carry the best wildlife photographs from around the world. Every year, numerous photos compete for the title of best photograph of the year by National Geographic magazine. National Geographic conducts a “Pictures of the Year” photo competition every year and announces the winners for 4 different categories nature, people, places, and animals. These mesmerizing images are shared online by the National Geographic website.
Meanwhile, an image of a whale swimming in the sea, while a full moon is seen in the sky, is being widely shared on social media. The moon looks very big and very near to the water in the image. The image is shared on social media platforms like X, etc. This image is in circulation with the claim that the image is a “National Geographic Award-winning photograph of the year”
Fact Check:
The claim is False. The viral image is not original. It has been generated using AI technology.
When we searched for articles about the winners of the recent photography contest, we found no announcement by National Geographic as the best photograph of the year for the year 2024 as yet. We found an article about the National Geographic Traveller (UK) photography competition 2024 winners. We did not find the viral image among the images shared in this article.
Also, we did not find the viral image in the photo contest gallery published by National Geographic. Here are all the images that were taken by the photo contest winners from various years since 2015.
Telugupost team checked the image using an AI image detector named ‘Is it AI’, and we found that the image is confirmed as an AI-generated image. According to this tool, the probability of the image being generated using AI is about 80%. Is it AI image detector that uses advanced machine learning algorithms to analyze images and classify them as either AI-generated or human-generated? It displays the results along with the confidence score.
When we also used another AI image detection tool Hive moderation to confirm our results, we found that the detection tool confirmed the image being AI generated with a probability of 96%.
Hence, the image being shared on the social media platforms with the claim that it is the National Geographic award-winning photo of the year is not an original photograph. It is AI-generated. The claim is False.