Is he even real? The internet had many questions after a photo began to circulate.<\/b>
\nIs he even real? The internet had many questions after a photo began to circulate.
It was, in nearly every way, an ordinary photo distributed by The Associated Press to news media outlets. It showed three police officers leaning against a silver car parked in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum in Paris just hours after the brazen theft of a collection of French crown jewels on Sunday.
But then there was the dapper man standing jauntily on the right side of the photo.
The officers, the AP caption said, were there to block the entrance to the museum. But the man, dressed in a buttoned up vest, a trench coat and a fedora, who seemed to be surveilling the scene, was more than enough reason for the internet to pounce.
In the days since the photo was uploaded, social media users \u2014 who had been romanticizing the crime as a Hollywood movie \u2014 have dreamed up numerous theories of who the unnamed man could be.
He was, many suggested, a detective assigned to the case who happened to have taken more than a few style cues from fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
\u201cNever gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically,\u201d Melissa Chen, a tech executive based in London, wrote in post on the social platform X that has been viewed more than 5 million times. \u201cTo solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who\u2019s in the middle of divorce. A functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates.\u201d
Others urged Netflix to secure the rights to the man\u2019s story for a future series. Some said he was simply being French.
Then, rather quickly, the conversation shifted. This sharp-dressed man, some social media users surmised, wasn\u2019t real. It was an image of a French detective generated with artificial intelligence.
The assumption that it was an AI creation felt plausible because there is something about the image that, to Matt Groh, a professor at Northwestern University whose research focuses on AI generated images, \u201cseems off.\u201d
It was perhaps because the man was so incredibly well dressed and so anachronistic compared with the people around him. His fedora is tilted just so. His skin looks flawless. He looks \u201ctoo good\u201d to be real, Groh said, like a star of an old black-and-white Hollywood film.
The photographer who took the photo, however, confirmed that the man was, in fact, real, and that he was merely a passerby unconnected to the investigation.
\u201cI don\u2019t know him,\u201d Thibault Camus, the AP photographer who shot the image, said in an interview Thursday. \u201cI don\u2019t know if he is French. Maybe a tourist? Maybe he is English.\u201d
It was the man\u2019s outfit that made Camus want to capture what seemed to him like a pointed moment \u2014 with someone dressed in an old-fashioned way walking out of a historic building. \u201cOld-fashioned like a museum can be,\u201d Camus added.
Another image by Camus of the same alley and the same police officers, but with a woman in a trench coat and a tan Yankees cap instead of the man, seemed to confirm his creative instincts, as that photo received much less attention.
There were, however, factors besides the man\u2019s immaculate style that could have tricked viewers into believing the image had been created or altered with AI, Groh said, including the fact that one version of the image being shared was particularly low resolution.
\u201cIf it\u2019s super-high resolution, then it\u2019s less likely to be AI generated, just because it\u2019s really hard to generate super-high resolution,\u201d Groh said.
There is also a proliferation of AI tools, like Google\u2019s Nano Banana, that allow users to paste a person or an object into an image. \u201cSomeone might think, \u2018Oh maybe he was copy-pasted in,\u2019\u201d Groh said. \u201cYou could imagine the entire scene where this guy didn\u2019t exist and it would look the exact same.\u201d
It is because we are surrounded by these kinds of AI images and tools that users are now also trained to be skeptical of everything they see, he added.
\u201cPeople are building AI literacy,\u201d Groh said, and the best way for users to know if an image like this is authentic is for the AP to say, \u201cWe know the photographer who took this \u2014 this is a real image.\u201d
Camus was happy to oblige.<\/p>\n