Dutch Newspaper Ran AI Photo of Woman Reportedly Fleeing Dubai

The largest newspaper in the Netherlands ran an AI-generated photo of a woman on its website alongside a made-up story about her attempting to book a flight out of Dubai.

According to a report by De Telegraaf published on March 5, “Tamara Harema” was attempting to rent an Airbus A321 so she could fly back to the Netherlands from Muscat, Oman along with other Dutch people. The evacuation comes amid a U.S.-Israel war with Iran.

The report in De Telegraaf was under the header: “Dutch people rent their own plane.” It was accompanied by a selfie photo of Tamara Harema, apparently in a hotel room with the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, behind her. But as Bellingcat reports, there were serious issues with both the photo and the text.

The photo shows signs of AI: look closer at the bedside lamp in the background and the stem appears broken. Bellingcat also points out that Harema’s earrings don’t sit right, and her V-neck shirt is strangely blurred.

There are also discrepancies in the Burj Khalifa. While the AI does a good job of recreating the skyscraper — likely because it’s been trained on an untold number of real photos of it — there are mistakes, like one of the floors being slightly lower than it should be and a water feature missing from the bottom.

Harema’s story also has holes in it. Bellingcat’s research found that while there were Airbus A321s departing Muscat on the days she mentioned, none of them were heading to the Netherlands — despite the report suggesting it would travel to Holland without detours.

Bellingcat contacted De Telegraaf about the report and the newspaper has since removed the photo as well as the accompanying text. A note has been added to the bottom: “An earlier version of this article contained a passage about renting an Airbus by the Dutch and a photo that presumably did not meet our journalistic guidelines. The passage and the photo in question have been deleted.”

The newspaper’s deputy editor-in-chief tells Bellingcat that a “long-standing source”, one Mr. Chizki Loonstein, gave one of the reporters the story of Tamara Harema. Bellingcat contacted Mr. Loonstein, a lawyer who emigrated to Dubai after his legal firm went bankrupt, who insisted he knows Harema. But after Bellingcat asked for her details, Loonstein stopped talking.