Viral image of Vladimir Putin suffering heart attack is AI-generated

Hyderabad: An image of Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly suffering a heart attack is doing the rounds on social media.

A Twitter user posted a clipping of The Moscow Times that said Putin suffered a heart attack. The image in the report shows the Russian President struggling on the floor.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that viral images are AI-generated and fake.

We performed a keyword search on the official website of The Moscow Times but could not find any relevant news article dated 12 May 2023, as mentioned in the viral image.

Further, we performed a reverse image search, which led us to a tweet by an Argentinian social media influencer with the username @mishapetrof who claimed the image of Mr. Putin was created using AI.

In the viral tweet, he said, “The picture is generated by Artificial Intelligence if anything.”

On carefully analyzing his Twitter account, we found that he uploads such AI-generated images, one of which is an image of Mr. Putin being arrested. The translated tweet reads, “Today Midjourney forbade the use of the words “arrest” and “prison” for generations, apparently due to the photorealistic pictures of Trump dispersing on the internet, but yesterday I managed to make such pictures with Putin.”

From this, it is evident that the photo of Russian President Putin having a heart attack is generated using AI and is not real. Hence, the claim is false.