A B-52 bomber crashed June 15 at a California U.S. Air Force base, killing all eight people aboard.
Military authorities said they are investigating what caused the accident, a process that can take upwards of six months. But some social media users seized on the breaking news, sharing images they falsely said showed the tragic scene.
A June 15 Facebook post showed a collage of images of a military plane taking off while burning, a mid-air explosion, a destroyed plane smoking on the ground and responders gathered at the scene.
“B-52 nuclear-armed bomber crashes at Edwards AFB – 8 confirmed dead as training mission turns tragic,” post’s caption read.
A June 16 Instagram post also reported on the crash, sharing images of a sooty and crumbled plane.
But as of June 16, Edwards Air Force Base, where the incident happened in Kern County, California, hasn’t released any images of the incident.
We ran the images in the Facebook post through Hive Moderation, an AI-detection tool. These programs are imperfect, but it concluded that the photos were “99.5% likely to be AI-generated.” It said the images were likely generated by ChatGPT Images 2.0, Open AI’s image generation model.
When introducing the pictures in the Instagram post to the same tool, it said most of them were around 99% “likely to be AI-generated images,” and also probably generated by ChatGPT Images 2.0.
We also plugged the Instagram images and the Facebook collage into Open AI’s image verification tool, which tells users if an image was generated with OpenAI tools. It said all the images we submitted had been “generated with OpenAI tools,” except for one of a fire truck next to a plane bursting in flames.
We introduced the fire truck image to Gemini, Google’s AI tool, and it detected a Synth ID, “which indicates that most or all of this image was edited or generated with Google AI.”
That fire truck photo is very similar to one shared in 2016 by KUAM-TV News in Guam after a B-52 bomber crashed at a U.S. Air Force base there. But the fire truck in the likely AI-generated image has a gibberish name, while the truck in the real image says “United States Air Force.”
(Screenshots of a real 2016 image from KUAM-TV News and a likely AI-generated image from an Instagram post)
Col. James Hayes, deputy commander for the 412 Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base, told reporters that the June 15 flight ended in an “unrecoverable crash” that was “unsurvivable.”
The wreckage was so severe, the plane was barely recognizable, CNN reported.
Other news outlets such as The Associated Press and ABC7 reported that aerial footage of the scene appeared to show virtually nothing left of the aircraft except ash. The news outlets also shared footage of the incident and it doesn’t match what’s shown on the social media pictures.
This footage of a B-52 bomber crash is from a past accident
Another video shared on social media in the crash’s aftermath received more than a million views, but showed footage of a different B-52 bomber crash from three decades ago.
“Another B-52 just crashed right after takeoff at Edwards AFB,” the X post said. Some users pushed back on the post, saying it didn’t show the June 15 incident.
After a reverse image search, PolitiFact confirmed the video is of a B-52 bomber that crashed near Spokane, Washington, at Fairchild Air Force Base in June 1994, leaving four dead.
The X account later clarified that the video was not related to the recent incident.
But other X accounts shared the same footage anyway, along with her caption.
