In June 2024, pictures of a rare species of pink dolphins went viral on the Internet. We decided to check if these shots are real.
Photos of unusually colored mammals were published entertaining And informational portals, social network users (“VKontakte", Facebook*, Instagram*, X) And blogging platforms. The pictures were also distributed on popular Telegram channels: “First People's"(92,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Militarist"(91,000), "Urgently. Now"(44,000), etc. Some posts contain only one image, others have two more pictures of the same dolphin from different angles. The places where the photographs were allegedly taken vary from one publication to another, with coastlines among the options Bulgaria, USA And Thailand.
Pink dolphins do occur in nature. For example, such an unusual color occurs in Amazonian river dolphin, which lives in the Amazon and Orinoco basins, and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin. However, the skin of these animals does not have such a bright and uniform color as in the viral images, we are talking only about a pinkish tint. Not a single authoritative “Verified” source has been able to find images of dolphins with skin of such a rich pink color. Pale pink color characteristic also for albino dolphins, however, even in this case, the shade is not so intense - blood vessels are visible through the skin devoid of pigment, which are simply not capable of giving it such a bright color.
Based on a reverse image search using TinEye, the earliest available post containing viral photos is fast dated June 19, 2024, which was posted on the image storage and sharing platform Imgur by user Lassannn. The post's headline reads: "Rare Pink Dolphin Spotted Off North Carolina." However, in the comments, other users of the platform doubted the veracity of the pictures, suspecting them to be the result of using neural networks.
To test this hypothesis, “Verified” used the service Hive AI Detector, which determines whether the images were generated by artificial intelligence. The analysis showed that in the case of three pictures with a pink dolphin, the probability of this varies from 82.2% to 96.7%.
It is noteworthy that these are not the only images of a pink dolphin allegedly spotted off the coast of North Carolina that went viral in mid-June 2024. In the English-speaking segment of the Internet, several more images of a mammal lying on the beach have become no less popular.
Photos were sorted out by project fact checkers Snopes. They concluded that these images were generated by artificial intelligence and found their author. It turned out to be a Facebook user Alex Lex — judging by his latest posts, he also created the pictures we are checking. The original post could not be found (probably the user deleted it). However, on June 21 Alex Lex published screenshots of several news sites that shared the "Verified" pictures being dissected, and wrote: "My dolphin is famous around the world: Indian, Philippine, Singaporean news this morning." Two days earlier he ironic: “People are like, ‘You’d have to be really stupid to believe this bullshit.’ And two days later, they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s an adorable pink dolphin!'” The user had posted AI-generated images on his page before, but they didn’t generate such a response.
Thus, although pale pink dolphins do occur in nature, the viral images were generated using a neural network. Moreover, the author made many more pictures with unusual animals, but only three of them were distributed in the Russian-language segment of the Internet.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: social networks
Read on the topic:
- National Geographic. Amazon River Dolphin
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