Without discussing the politics or the things actually happening there, I can assure you this photo will not haunt me because it is not a photograph.
It's quite obviously AI generated nonsense and whoever generated it didn't even do a good job. A well fed woman holding a starving small man (doesn't look anything like a child)? We have actual pictures of real starving emaciated children and their parents from countries around the world where starvation is really a thing. Does anyone remember the Ethiopian food crisis? There you would see the emaciated children along with the emaciated parents. They definitely did not look like this AI nonsense.
ben_w · 5h ago
I won't say that it definitely isn't AI generated, but only because AI image generation is extraordinarily capable these days.
And I won't tell you that people won't use fake images. People have been doing that since the camera was invented.
What I can say is that your response doesn't help. There's plenty of evidence from multiple sources that there's starvation in Gaza. The food supply is wildly insufficient to support the population, and last I checked Israel was still enforcing a general blockade that happens to also include food. There's nothing remotely resembling a functioning local government able to organise aid and supplies, and Israel considers the closest thing that Gaza had to one to be illegitimate. The attempt by Israel itself to organise food is being widely criticised both as inadequate and prone to shooting the very people it's ostensibly there to provide food to.
Of the photo (presuming that it is one), all I can tell of her is "not obese", owing to the way the clothes are loose. Who she is holding looks to me to be a child, given they are clearly smaller than she herself is. I cannot tell you if they are related, or if the woman is a nurse and the child a patient.
yawpitch · 6h ago
Photo is on the front page of CNN.com right now, with a follow up shot of the same woman and child credited as well to the same photographer and Getty Images. While they’re obviously capable of being tricked, that provenance tends to auger against it being AI-generated. Also dismissing an image of a child starving because an adult isn’t starving alongside them is utterly illogical on its face, unless you know for certain the exact relationship between the two people in the image… which, if you held that information, would also point to the image not being faked.
It's quite obviously AI generated nonsense and whoever generated it didn't even do a good job. A well fed woman holding a starving small man (doesn't look anything like a child)? We have actual pictures of real starving emaciated children and their parents from countries around the world where starvation is really a thing. Does anyone remember the Ethiopian food crisis? There you would see the emaciated children along with the emaciated parents. They definitely did not look like this AI nonsense.
And I won't tell you that people won't use fake images. People have been doing that since the camera was invented.
What I can say is that your response doesn't help. There's plenty of evidence from multiple sources that there's starvation in Gaza. The food supply is wildly insufficient to support the population, and last I checked Israel was still enforcing a general blockade that happens to also include food. There's nothing remotely resembling a functioning local government able to organise aid and supplies, and Israel considers the closest thing that Gaza had to one to be illegitimate. The attempt by Israel itself to organise food is being widely criticised both as inadequate and prone to shooting the very people it's ostensibly there to provide food to.
Of the photo (presuming that it is one), all I can tell of her is "not obese", owing to the way the clothes are loose. Who she is holding looks to me to be a child, given they are clearly smaller than she herself is. I cannot tell you if they are related, or if the woman is a nurse and the child a patient.
https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/gaza-famine-israel-o...