Ask Lemmy

Eyeballing the photo is hopeless.

If you want to check credibility, do it the old fashion way, before AI existed: Check the source.

I'll take a stab.

OP is: https://old.reddit.com/user/RustySchmeckleford/

Post history is hidden. And in their entire history, they only have two comments. Weird, but inconclusive.

Dead end.

No results on Tineye. The exact image is one day old on Google Images, but it is showing a few visually similar posts. For example:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/31/a-week-on-the-block-where-alex-pretti-was-killed

An original photo from The Guardian? Reasonable to assume that's real. But that's from Minneapolis.

Alright... let's look for clues. What's NRG Arena?

An arena in Houston, Texas, as it turns out. Found this on Facebook searching for that text:

That's definitely the poster. This is probably some real street corner in Houston. That concert was in 2025, so It's reasonable to assume the poster survived into 2026.

And that lets us narrow down the search. For instance, local Houston news posted this:

https://cw39.com/news/local/houston-ice-agent-shooting/

https://cw39.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/salgado_araujo_memorial3.jpg

CNN posted the original photo the poster is based on. Again, quite credible:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/07/us/houston-ice-shooting-death

So... is the photo fake?

Shrug.

RustySchmeckleford could've taken a random 2025 photo, a picture of the poster, and AI'd it onto the wall. It's impossible to tell.

But all the components are real.

I'd argue you're asking the wrong question. If some rando in the internet posts a picture, AI or no AI you have no idea if it's real or not. You have to ingest it with that in mind.

To be blunt: you will never know if it's AI or not.

You could dig into the Reddit user or analyze it all you want, you could trace the source of the poster template or pixel peep for artifacts, but fact is this post has zero credibility. That's true of anything from internet strangers.

If you want credible, get info from credible source. It's that simple. /u/RustySchmeckleford/ is not The Guardian.

@grok is this photo AI ?

Are we concerned that the image is AI or that the content of the posters is not real? As others have said, the image doesn't have the usual tells of AI, but also there are plenty of articles that confirm the content of the posters. Lorenzo was indeed murdered by ICE and was a father of 3. Who was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, through the words of his son

The printing on each poster looks the same, and you can see the wrinkles from pasting it are all different. It does not appear to be AI.

AI would either mess up the text and pictures, or make the defects all the same. In this case, the things that should be the same are all the same, and the things that should be different are all different.

it’s composed in a way that’s both really good and something AI probably won’t do

It would probably be easier to Photoshop this than to AI generate it and get all the posters looking right.

I don't see any obvious tells, but why do you ask?

Almost certainly not. Way too much detail and missing all of the obvious tells.

No, AI can't really replicate the same thing multiple times in the same picture. They would have slight variations.

It is also not photoshopped, since the creases in the paper are too detailed around the letters.

The reason why it looks off is because the bottom right corners of the 2 right posters are curling up, giving a weird perspective on the letters. As if you were looking straight on.

I looked at Lorenzo for a long time, because I felt something avout him was unusual. I finally realized that his ears are not visible/maybe he doesn't have any which surprised me due to his short hair. Likely the reason why the posters feel off.

The rest of the photo looks quite real to me, with the cigarette buds, grunge etc.