Late Saturday afternoon, once I was home from Philly’s third No Kings march on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, an incredible photo of the protest began spreading online. It shows a solidly packed crowd of tens of thousands of people holding signs, ant-like in a high aerial view, cramming the blocks west and northwest of City Hall. It was amazing. It was also fake.
How can you tell it’s AI? Look. The geography on the ground is off. It just doesn’t match our park architecture or the layout of the streets. The base of City Hall looks fuzzy and smoky. There’s no Love Park off the northwest corner of City Hall. The streets are invisible under a densely uniform crowd, packing most of the frame. There are no large banners and only two American flags visible, and the signs are all tidy white rectangles with garbled indications of black text.
Anyone familiar with Philly who took a moment to reality-test this image could have seen that it’s fake. And anyone who was actually in the crowd should have known that while the Philly protest was huge (estimated at 40,000 people), it didn’t look at all like it does in that image.
Keep your guard up
But even if you didn’t know any of that (lots of people wouldn’t! That’s fine!), we still could’ve rooted this out as fake. It was being shared without any attribution to a photographer or original source—just the photo, accompanied by comments like “Wow! Philly!” It was not being shared by any professional local journalism outlets. If you can’t tell where something originated, or it’s uncredited, be suspicious, especially if it’s regarding a major news event, and especially if it’s eye-popping.
I understand why fake images of huge crowds are exciting and convincing. By early counts, at least 8 million people participated in more than 3,000 protests reaching all 50 states on March 28 (not to mention protests on every continent, including five people in Antarctica). That is a historic number. When we see fantastic crowd images, we want to believe it, and boost it—especially as top legacy outlets like the New York Times go out of their way to downplay and criticize this movement.
But if we really want pro-democracy protests to thrive, we need to keep our guard up—especially when AI is showing us something that we want to believe. It’s easy to document that these protests truly were massive, even just from millions of photos shared by the participants themselves.
There are so many harmful narratives about the current movement to end the unconstitutional agenda of Trump and his corrupt MAGA cabinet and cowering members of Congress, from leftist cynics’ whine that mass peaceful protest doesn’t matter to right-wingers’ weird canard that anti-Trump protestors are being paid (I have not yet received my check). Sharing AI-generated images of huge crowds fuels democracy’s foes, making it easier for them to claim that the protests are not a genuine indicator of American sentiment.
True views of No Kings
That’s why I always personally share pictures of big protest events like this after attending, and it’s part of why BSR brings you views of Philly protests (like last April’s “Hands Off” rally, the original No Kings Day last June, and No Kings 2 in October)…