Picture of Mexico president wearing 'Make America Mexicana Again' cap is fake
Picture of Mexico president wearing ‘Make America Mexicana Again’ cap is fake
(Web Desk) - An image of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum wearing a cap with “Make America Mexicana Again” printed across the crown is fake.
The image was shared online ahead of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan 20. The cap in the image bears striking resemblance to Trump's trademark red "Make America Great Again" hats.
Some of the posts shared online carry the Grok logo, as seen in the bottom right of the photo. Grok is the chatbot of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI, available on the social media platform X.
Professor James O'Brien, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an email to Reuters that there were several reasons to think the image was AI-generated.
“The teeth spacing, ears shape, and wrinkle patterns all look different than from reference images of Sheinbaum,” O’Brien said.. He added that the image was cleaner and smoother than an actual image as the lines of the hair and skin wrinkles appeared well-aligned.
Siwei Lyu, a professor of computer science and engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said in an email that the image was very likely to be AI-generated, noting that the fonts of the words on the cap were inconsistent.
Shahroz Tariq , an Australian-based researcher working on human-AI collaborative systems for cybersecurity, also pointed out discrepancies in the image. “There seems to be something wrong around one of the ears and the sunglasses,” he said, without labeling the image AI-generated.
Trump signed an executive order on Jan 20 renaming the Gulf of Mexico "Gulf of America," after having floated the idea during his election campaign.
Trump pledged again on Jan 7 to rename the region and Sheinbaum on Jan 8 suggested North America, including the United States, could be renamed "Mexican America" - an historic name used on an early map of the region.
