Iranian propaganda images made with AI end up in major German media outlet

German magazine Der Spiegel has removed several images from its Iran coverage after determining they were most likely AI-generated or AI-manipulated.

The photos came from the agency SalamPix and made their way into German image databases through the French agency Abaca Press. According to Der Spiegel, numerous other german media outlets are also affected, including Zeit, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, WDR, Stern, Deutschlandfunk, Deutsche Welle, Welt, taz, and B.Z.

German digital image forensics company Neuramancer analyzed five suspicious cases on behalf of Der Spiegel. The results: an aerial photo of an Iranian aircraft carrier, a photo of Ali Khamenei with his son Mojtaba, and an image of an embassy building in Niger were all classified as likely AI-generated. An explosion image from Tehran showed traces of the AI tool Flux 2. Only one image - showing Iranian schoolgirls - came back clean.

Abaca Press CEO Jean-Michel Psaila acknowledged that SalamPix had done sloppy work. An Iranian photographer admitted to feeding images from a platform run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) into the agency's system without labeling them as such. The Revolutionary Guards are the second pillar of Iran's armed forces alongside the regular military. They protect the Islamist regime, operate their own intelligence service, and according to Amnesty International and other human rights organizations played a central role in the violent crackdown on recent protests, in which current estimates suggest between 7,000 and up to 36,500 civilians were killed.

The IRGC also runs an extensive propaganda apparatus with its own news agencies, media production units, and cyber divisions. Just recently, the regime-aligned Tehran Times published what it claimed was a satellite image showing the destruction of a US radar installation in Qatar - it turned out to be an AI-manipulated Google Earth image.

The investigation was triggered by the Dutch news agency ANP, which had already blocked around 1,000 SalamPix images. RTL Netherlands also reported on the incident. German agencies dpa Picture Alliance, Imago, and ddp subsequently blocked SalamPix as well. Der Spiegel stressed that AI-generated images in news reporting are a clear taboo and said it would review the case internally.