Photos of Ukrainian children generated by artificial intelligence

Photos of children are often generated by artificial intelligence. Don’t let fake newsmakers manipulate your emotions!  

Fakes again, and again with children. Children often evoke strong emotions, such as compassion, indignation, and fear. Many people tend to trust information about children, believing they cannot be part of manipulations. This tendency helps fake news spread faster and attract more attention. 

What’s it all about?

Several interconnected Facebook pages have been actively sharing photos of little girls in blue and yellow uniforms singing on stage. 

One post reads, “A 5-year-old Ukrainian girl sang so well that the whole hall gave her a standing ovation — 130 million views in just one day — video of the performance in the comments.” 

Another post claims, “A 3-year-old Ukrainian girl conquered the stage with her unusual singing: The audience gave a standing ovation; in just one day this video was viewed by 10 million people — video in the comments.” 

Hundreds of users have shared these posts, and tens of thousands have liked them.

An entire Facebook network of trashy fake accounts was involved in this information campaign:

• “Information Bomb” (about one million readers);
• “Info-shock” (44,000 followers); 
• “Patriots of Ukraine” (304,000 followers);
• “Real News” (30,000 followers), etc. 

These accounts published photos of the little singers on their pages (see screenshots), commented on each other’s posts, and supported each other with likes. 

Refutation  

However, these little girls in these photos are not real. The images were generated by artificial intelligence. 

This can be discerned by the smoothness of the colours, the depth of the frame, and even the errors with the fingers. 

Additionally, programs for detecting artificially generated content indicate a high probability that these photos are not real. For example, Hive Moderation indicates a 98.8% probability that these photos were created by AI. 

Each of these posts contains a link to the “news myzukrainy net” trash site in the comments. The main goal is clearly to attract as many visitors as possible. 

The site’s content consists of low-quality texts with emotional and clickbait headlines. They also use a scheme of replacing Cyrillic letters with Latin letters and numbers, which is familiar to many people, in order to deceive search engine algorithms in case someone decides to check the information. Much of the content is borrowed from various anonymous Telegram channels. 

The posts with photos of fake girls have since been removed from the site. Instead, there is a link to the YouTube channel “Breakfast with 1+1” featuring a real performance by a young girl. 

The caption reads, “The little Ukrainian girl who conquered the network by singing at Warsaw Airport. Here is the video that has already garnered tens of millions of views! This is Amelia Anisovych, who at the beginning of the full-scale war became famous for her singing in a bomb shelter,” and the video has been viewed by about 290,000 people. 

The post about the three-year-old girl contains a link to the YouTube channel “Creative Studio MYAV.” The song is performed by Yaryna Mytsyk, who is clearly older than three years. Moreover, the video was published a year ago