There's no evidence this Mitch McConnell rehab photo is AI

As deepfakes proliferate across the internet, a recent photograph of Senator Mitch McConnell became a test case for distinguishing authentic images from artificial ones—and the forensic techniques that emerged reveal how precarious our trust in visual evidence has become. Experts deployed metadata analysis, lighting physics, and pixel-level scrutiny to verify the image's authenticity, underscoring a sobering reality: the burden of proof for what we see is shifting from skepticism of the fake to authentication of the real. The incident exposes a looming crisis for institutions from courts to newsrooms that depend on photographs as documentary evidence.

BBC·1h ago