Fact Check: Modi stages tea garden visit in Assam? No, image is AI-generated

Hyderabad: Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Assam on April 1 ahead of elections in the state. He toured a tea garden in Dibrugarh and interacted with workers. The Times of India on April 1 reported that during the visit, he was seen plucking tea leaves alongside women workers.

After PM Modi’s images and visuals with the women workers surfaced online, an image circulated on social media claiming he allegedly took a full shooting crew to film his time with them.

The viral image shows PM Modi sitting with a group of women workers in a tea garden and a shooting crew filming it with full camera setups and equipment. The space appears to be surrounded by tents and people watching the shoot. It is being claimed that the visit was completely staged and part of a public relations campaign.

Several users shared the image on Facebook and X. Trinamool Congress MP Kirti Azad also posted the image on X and wrote, “He has surpassed #AmitabhBachchan and #Rajinikanth. He acting and dramatics is un parallel. The stage is perfectly set. This is not impromptu but by design. Look at what goes behind the scenes. It is set to perfection. People struggling in LPG lines, but #VishGuru spends crores for a single frame. Only the Great #AndhBhakts will understand.” (Archive)

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is false. An AI-generated image was falsely shared as PM Modi shooting with a film crew during his visit to Assam.

Firstly, we did not find any credible news reports or social media posts that reported using the viral image regarding PM Modi’s visit.

Visual analysis

We found several anomalies of generative AI in the viral image. The texts throughout writing in several places appear as nonsensical characters or gibberish. The clapperboard in the bottom left corner is scrambled and the text is illegible.

The labels on the black tents (‘WARDROBE’ and ‘OFFICE’) and the green container (‘CREW’) feature distorted letters and inconsistent fonts. The people standing behind the green container are repetitive in posture and lack distinct facial features, which is a common pattern in AI-generated crowds.

AI content detection tools

We uploaded the image to Hive Moderation’s AI content detection tool. The tool results suggested that the image is highly likely AI-generated with a probability score of 99.9 per cent.

Google DeepMind’s SynthID detector found that the image was created using Google AI. This detector identifies digital watermarks embedded directly into images generated by Google AI. The embedded SynthID was detected on most of the image (blue tiles in the image shown below).

AI content detector Sight Engine identified that the image is 99 per cent likely to be AI-generated. The tool also noted that it is 96 per cent likely that the image has been created using Imagen/Nano Banana AI models.