Fact check: Are B.C. election candidates using AI-generated photos?

More than 300 candidates across 93 ridings are running in the BC provincial election. But how do we verify if the photos they've submitted are real or AI-generated? CBC News uses photos of candidates in our digital and TV coverage, and we need to verify each one. That's getting more complicated to do because of how often people are using AI tools like Gemini not just to generate photos from scratch, but to alter real photos. CBC sent an email to all parties stating that we will not accept any AI-generated or overtly manipulated candidate photos for our coverage. We do accept photos that have minor retouching using standard photo editing tools. But once we received the candidate photos and went through the process of verifying their authenticity, Google's SynthID watermark was detected in many of them. The problem is that alone doesn't mean the image is entirely AI-generated. As a test, we took this photo of my senior producer, David Michael Lamb, and asked Gemini to remove the background. It did that and didn't change anything else about the image. But now this image is flagged as AI-generated or edited, which could make people think it's a fake person, even though it isn't. That seems to be the case for several of the BC candidate photos that we analyzed. We also tested whether Gemini could change more than just the background. We took this photo and asked Gemini to change the outfit. Our prompt was, change the clothing to a blue wool cable knit sweater. We got this result. The sweater is entirely AI-generated, and Gemini also added people into the background, even though that wasn't part of the prompt. This is now flagged as an AI-generated image, even though the face hasn't changed. Other candidate photos contained a different watermark, Adobe Trustmark. Adobe's generative fill AI feature was used in several of the photos we analyzed. We tested that feature too, taking this image and using it to generate a forest with a lake in the background. But while we can tell when tools like this have been used, we can't always tell exactly what parts of an image have been altered. As part of our verification process, we also compared the submitted images to other photos that exist of the candidates. Some photos raised technical red flags that suggest they may have been edited with AI. For those candidates, we went back and asked them to explain how they edited a photo and to submit the original, unedited file. Ultimately, we verified the photos from all candidates are real, and the photos you'll see during CBC's BC election special have all been verified by us. If you are seeing other photos or videos you'd like us to fact-check, send us an email at [email protected].