Incident 1049: AI Tools Reportedly Used to Fabricate Image of 5,000-Naira Nigerian Banknote Featuring President Bola Tinubu

Description: An image circulated on Nigerian social media in late January 2025 purporting to show a newly issued 5,000-naira banknote featuring President Bola Tinubu. The Central Bank of Nigeria denied the claim, and fact-checkers reported that the image was likely generated using an AI tool linked to the platform X, based on a visible Grok watermark.

Editor Notes: For a similar AI incident involving naira misinformation, see Incident 1032: Reported Doctored Video of Nigerian President Bola Tinubu Claims Naira Will Be Replaced by U.S. Dollar.

Tools

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Entities

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Alleged: xAI developed an AI system deployed by Unknown X (Twitter) users and Unidentified social media users, which harmed Public trust in the naira , General public of Nigeria and Central Bank of Nigeria.

Alleged implicated AI systems: X (Twitter) and Grok

Incident Stats

Incident ID

1049

Report Count

Incident Date

2025-01-26

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Nigeria's central bank has not unveiled a new N5,000 note – ignore AI-generated image

africacheck.org

africacheck.org · 2025

IN SHORT: According to Facebook users in Nigeria, the Central Bank of Nigeria has unveiled a new N5,000 note that bears the face of president Bola Tinubu. But this is not true and the image was generated using an artificial intelligence too…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.