Is an image of an Indiana Hoosiers fan who looks like Charlie Kirk at the football game held against the Ohio State Buckeyes on Oct. 17, 2026, real? No, that’s not true: Footage from the Fox broadcast shows a person with a mustache and curly hair, not Kirk. Online tools determined that the Kirk lookalike image was highly likely to be AI.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) by the @_TruthZone_ account on X on Oct. 17, 2026. It read:
IS THAT WHO I THINK IT IS???
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
The photo shows the time during the game as 3:09 in the second quarter, with a score of three for the Ohio State Buckeyes and seven for the Indiana Hoosiers. A video (archived here) posted on the Santhirapalan Suganiya account on YouTube on Oct. 17, 2026, features a full replay of the game. The footage shows a man with a mustache and curly hair that falls over his forehead. The image posted on X shows a man with a widow’s peak hairline like Kirk. The image posted on X matches the footage at 40:30 in the video. This is a screenshot of the video showing the real person:
In addition to the video evidence, Lead Stories tested the image with two AI detection tools, both of which found that the image was likely generated by AI…