Pink Panther protest images were AI-made, not scenes from French unrest

Images of a figure in a Pink Panther costume received millions of views as purported scenes from France’s recent protests and riots. The pictures showed the character amid riot police, carrying a rifle, vandalising surveillance cameras and being dragged through a street by police, but they were not authentic photographs from the unrest. The images circulated beside genuine videos of demonstrations, clashes and police deployments. That overlap made it harder to distinguish fictional imagery from real footage of events that saw between 550,000 and 800,000 people demonstrate across France on Oct. 17 over the cost of living and in support of high-school students, while violence broke out in several major cities. Google’s SynthID Detector flagged markers associated with content made using Google AI tools, according to Cybernews. A reverse-image search also showed that the image of Pink Panther being taken away by police had been manipulated from a years-old photograph of a man being carried by officers before a football match. Separate verification traced the images to the Instagram account @aliframez, which publishes AI artwork placing familiar fictional characters in invented scenes of disorder. The account’s original Pink Panther post was labelled AI-generated, and its creator told BBC Verify that the project was artistic and was not intended to mislead people or become viral. Other posts on the account have put Homer Simpson and the Teletubbies in comparable settings. The distinction matters because actual protesters had appeared in costume. Genuine footage from the French demonstrations included people dressed as Captain America and Superman, providing a plausible visual backdrop for the fabricated Pink Panther material. AI labels on an initial post can disappear when material is shared again, leaving viewers to encounter it as if it were documentary footage. WIRED separately found potentially altered or AI-generated Pink Panther images in TikTok results for “blocus,” a search term associated with the protest content that was also being used to promote an “Act II” of the protests for Oct. 24. AI-generated images purporting to show an elderly couple being “stripped and robbed” also drew millions of views, particularly through far-right accounts. FRANCE 24 found no official confirmation that the alleged assault had happened, and traced one image to an AI photomontage published by the pro-Israel account Infos-Israel.news.