Description: Reports said that, in the early days of the war in Iran, purported AI-generated fakes showing nonexistent wartime scenes reached millions of viewers online. Their spread across social media and messaging apps allegedly distorted public perception of the conflict and contributed to information disorder.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Image generator developers , Generative AI developers and Deepfake technology developers developed an AI system deployed by Social media accounts and Disinformation actors, which harmed social media users , People seeking information about the war in Iran , National security and intelligence stakeholders , General public and Epistemic integrity.
Alleged implicated AI systems: X (Twitter) , Image generator technology , Unknown generative AI technology , Deepfake technology , TikTok , Social media platforms and Facebook
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1406
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2026-02-28
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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Despite US President Donald Trump dismissing the idea of sending ground troops to Iran amid the expanding war in the Middle East, images purporting to show American soldiers captured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have spread across soc…
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Fake photos of the war in Iran are flooding social media, with Elon Musk's X platform breaking its own rules by allowing users to create AI pictures of real warzones.
"Iran is totally winning", reads the caption on one fake image of a downe…
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A torrent of fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of the war in Iran.
The videos --- showing huge explosions that never happened, decimated city streets that were ne…
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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