Trump wasn't taken into police custody after his conviction. Image is AI | Fact check

Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY
·3 min read

The claim: Image shows police taking Trump into custody

A May 30 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) appears to show former President Donald Trump being taken into custody by a group of police officers.

“Guilty!” the caption reads.

The post received more than 9,000 likes in less than a day.

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Our rating: Altered

The image was generated with artificial intelligence, according to experts and an online detection tool. Police did not take Trump into custody after his May 30 conviction. He remains free pending sentencing July 11.

Trump image ‘very obviously the product of AI’

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, became the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a felony when a New York jury found him guilty on all 34 counts he faced of falsifying business records to hide a hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. He faces up to four years in prison when he is sentenced in July.

But he was not taken into police custody. The image in the Instagram post is an AI-generated fabrication, according to two experts and an online AI detector.

Fact check: Photos showing Trump arrested by law enforcement are computer-generated

“It is very obviously the product of AI,” Walter Scheirer, an engineering professor at Notre Dame whose area of research includes visual recognition, told USA TODAY.

V.S. Subrahmanian, a computer science professor at Northwestern University and an AI expert, agreed that the image is likely a fabrication.

The online detection tool Hive Moderation reported it 99.9% likely to be AI-generated.

The image gives a misleading impression about the events that took place in and around the Manhattan courtroom. Instead of being apprehended by police, the former president left on his own. He spoke briefly to the media before departing in an SUV. He spoke at a news conference the following day and remains scheduled to debate President Joe Biden on June 27 in Atlanta, none of which would be possible had he been taken into custody by authorities.

The image also gets a smaller detail wrong: The color of his tie. Trump wore a solid blue tie to court that day, not the one with blue and white stripes shown in the fabricated image.

Other details in the image also reveal it to be a fabrication.

The officer to Trump’s right has two badges. The officer behind him has a deformed badge on his hat. And the hands shown in Trump's armpits don't clearly connect to any officers in the picture.

“The overall appearance of the image isn't photorealistic,” Scheirer said. “It looks more like a cartoon, which is commonly observed in the output of generative AI models.”

Fabricated images of Trump have regularly caused confusion on social media. USA TODAY has previously debunked claims that images show Trump at a cookout surrounded by Black supporters, leading a crowd down a flag-lined street and on a plane with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Those images were each created with AI.

USA TODAY reached out to the Instagram user who shared the post but did not immediately receive a response.

PolitiFact also debunked the claim.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: AI behind image of police taking Trump into custody | Fact check

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