Viral image of elderly couple stripped and surrounded by rioters in France was ‘made or edited with AI’

A viral image of an elderly couple being stripped and robbed during the riots in France has been flagged as being made or edited by AI. 

The photograph, shared yesterday, purportedly showed a man and woman in their underwear while surrounded by several men in all-black outfits. 

The image was viewed nearly six million times on X and was shared by several police unions as the country was overrun by rioters this weekend. 

But there are major inconsistencies in the image and Google’s SynthID Detector indicated that it was AI generated. 

Reports from French media also indicated the image was created using AI.  

There are several visual errors in the photo. Two ‘rioters’ were seen sharing the same pair of legs, while the elderly woman’s hand appears to be missing a finger. 

On top of this, the faces of two people appear to be merged in the background, while another appears to be missing their bottom half.  

Passing the image through specialist software reveals the image has a watermark that indicates it was made or edited by a generative AI. 

The initial image that was shared on social media indicated it was made using Google Gemini, while a variant of the picture that appeared to be ‘clearer’ was linked with OpenAI’s AI technology. 

In both cases, the images had an invisible watermark known as ‘SynthID’, which is placed on images that are generated by AI. 

The biggest AI firms in the world, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have signed up to the Google service that allows users to understand whether what they are seeing has been generated by AI. 

Before the image was released, French media reported that an 80-year-old couple at Place de la Republique, a major square in Paris, had been robbed and left nearly naked by rioters. 

But local media also reported that this incident has not yet been confirmed by Parisian police. 

Despite the indications of this being an AI-generated image, several people shared the photo as if it were real. 

Darren Grimes, a Reform councillor who is deputy leader of Durham County Council, wrote: ‘This is a truly horrifying scene from France. This is ‘eat the rich’ meeting its end destination. I hope each of these left-wing thugs meets the full force of French policing. Macron needs to go ASAP.’ 

Meanwhile, Kevin Corke, a senior national correspondent at Fox News, simply wrote: ‘Horrifying…’

Earlier, President Emmanuel Macron turned down his interior minister’s offer to resign, telling him instead on Monday to put an end to barricades and looting and be transparent over intelligence failings, as France licked its wounds from weekend rioting.

The protests follow weeks of student demonstrations with occasional bouts of street violence, rocking the country six months ahead of its next presidential election and increasing pressures over a weak economy and surging debt. 

Some half a million people turned out across France to protest the surging cost of living, a culmination of four weeks of protests that began with high school students demanding better conditions at their schools.

What started as peaceful demonstrations morphed into violence in some places, as masked groups on the sidelines of the protests attacked law enforcement, broke into town halls and other public buildings, setting many of them ablaze, looted shops, and set fire to cars, bicycles and scooters on the streets.

Fears of tensions inside Mr Macron’s fragile government over apparent security shortcomings – coming just as the government needs to pass a much-needed budget bill to rein in its finances – are set to further unsettle investors.

At the weekend, hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest over what many say are declining and dysfunctional public services that leave citizens to fend for themselves amid cost-of-living pressures.

In many places including the capital Paris, Marseille and the city of Lyon, peaceful protests were quickly hijacked by rioters, leading to scenes of vandalism and chaos. 

France deployed 60,000 police and other security forces on Saturday, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told France Inter radio, but acknowledged that wasn’t enough to control violent crowds in ‘certain cities’.

Mr Macron’s presidential office, the Elysee, said on Monday that Mr Nunez, a former Paris police chief, offered the president his resignation following the riots.

Mr Nunez offered to resign on Monday after more than 2,500 people were arrested and nearly 1,000 members of the security forces injured. Protesters were also hurt, with one demonstrator’s hand blown off by a police crowd-control grenade.

‘On Saturday, in some major cities, you couldn’t look shopkeepers in the eye after hundreds of shops had been looted and tell them we hadn’t lost control,’ he said.

Mr Macron refused but urged Mr Nunez to urgently come up with new concepts ‘to put an end to the barricades and looting,’ the Elysee said.

It added that Mr Nunez also needed to ‘ensure transparency regarding the failures in foresight and intelligence that led to the violence’.

Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin, a longtime Macron ally, echoed the president’s calls on Monday, telling France 2 television there were intelligence failures that left the state vulnerable in the face of what he called ‘extreme-left’ rioters it had underestimated. 

Nationwide, more than 2,330 people were taken into police custody over the weekend, 70 percent of whom were adults, Mr Darmanin said on Monday.

More than 2,000 shops were expected to have been affected by the weekend’s violence across France, with damage running into ‘hundreds of millions of euros’, according to chamber of commerce president Alain Di Crescenzo.

In an address to the nation Sunday evening, Macron slammed the ‘unbridled’ violence and said local authorities would be able to ban – ‘if necessary’ – certain rallies in coming days.

But he stopped short of announcing drastic measures, such as a state of emergency or curfew.

City authorities in Marseille said on Monday that public gatherings would be banned from noon to 8pm local time.  

The public discontent showed no signs of subsiding on Monday, with demonstrators blocking the entrance to Paris’s iconic Louvre Museum, the most visited in the world.

‘We are proud to announce that we are blocking the world’s largest museum,’ read a leaflet posted outside the museum, as management and unions said the protest was led by students from Ecole du Louvre.

Rising prices have fuelled anger in France, where diesel prices have jumped nearly 40 percent and petrol by 25 percent since March and where food prices have risen by 25 percent since 2021. 

The unrest in France has flared just months before a key presidential election where centrist Macron cannot stand again and Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate for the National Rally party, is riding high in the polls.

Ministers have blamed ‘ultra-left’ groups for the violence, while Le Pen claimed that the party of her far-left rival for the presidency, Jean-Luc Melenchon, had ‘legitimised the violence’.

The left has accused Macron of ignoring protesters’ demands, while the right is calling on him to take a firmer line. 

With costs of living rising across Europe, smaller demonstrations have broken out in other countries.

During the weekend, clashes broke out on the sidelines of a cost-of-living demonstration in Milan, with Mayor Giuseppe Sala warning: ‘I’m very worried because it’s a new phenomenon, which also originates from an international scenario and therefore feeds itself.’

In Spain, hundreds of tents have occupied Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol square since September, when the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her lifelong flat sparked nationwide protests in a country with soaring housing costs.

Dozens of tents have also sprung up in Portugal’s main cities of Lisbon and Porto, with protesters demanding action over rising costs of housing.