Within hours of President Trump’s announcement of the dramatic weekend capture of Nicolás Maduro, social media was flooded with AI-generated deepfakes showing the captured Venezuelan dictator in handcuffs and even sitting alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was previously locked up in the same jail where Maduro now is in real life.
The onslaught of AI-altered images mixed with real facts and verified photos created a confusing mess in the midst of a stunning breaking news moment, with some public figures amplifying the deepfake content.
“This was the first time I’d personally seen so many AI-generated images of what was supposed to be a real moment in time,” Roberta Braga, executive director of Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, a think tank, told the New York Times.
One of the fakes shows Combs doing a weird dance in a jail cell as Maduro appears to hold back tears on a nearby jail cot. The disgraced rapper, whose sex-trafficking case mentioned lurid use of baby oil, is then seen spraying the deposed dictator with bottles of fluid as “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” plays. The rest of the bizarre clip is a montage of the two acting like a couple while Maduro sports a blonde wig.
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Combs spent the duration of his own trial before being convicted last year for transporting people across state lines for sexual encounters.
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson poked fun at the coincidence while taking his latest shot at his longtime nemesis Combs.
Jackson made an Instagram post of a cartoon image of Combs doing Maduro’s hair in the clink while exclaiming, “They took my oil also!” — a cheeky reference both to Combs’ sleazy habits and US plans to take over Venezuela’s oil industry.
NewsGuard, which tracks the accuracy of online information, found five AI-generated and out-of-context images and two misleading videos falsely linked to Maduro’s capture that garnered more than 14.1 million views total on X in less than two days.
The content also appeared on Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook, though it racked up fewer clicks on those sites, NewsGuard said.
“While many of these visuals do not drastically distort the facts on the ground, the use of AI and dramatic, out-of-context video represents another tactic in the misinformers’ arsenal – and one that is harder for fact checkers to expose because the visuals often approximate reality,” NewsGuard stated in a report released Monday.
Here’s the latest on Nicolás Maduro’s capture:
In one AI deepfake, Maduro is seen dressed in white pajamas and sitting on a US military cargo plane surrounded by soldiers in uniform, according to the report.
Some other deepfakes showed Maduro in a grey sweat suit – the same outfit he was wearing in a verified photo from the White House – while being escorted out of a plane by US soldiers.
By the time Trump posted a verified image of Maduro, handcuffed and dressed in a grey sweat suit aboard the USS Iwo Jima warship, it was too late. Many social media users were skeptical about whether the image posted by Trump was real.
“It’s funny, but very common: Doubt the truth and believe the lie,” Jeanfreddy Gutiérrez, who runs a fact-checking operation in Caracas, told the Times.
AI-detection platforms and tools like reverse-image search can help identify false content, but it can be difficult to trace deepfakes back to their original sources.
The Times found that many mainstream AI tools, including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI models and Grok, were quickly used to create false images of Maduro free of charge. Smaller platforms like Z-Image, Reve and Seedream were used, too.
“We make it easy to determine if content is made with Google AI by embedding an imperceptible SynthID watermark in all media generated by our AI tools,” a Google spokesperson told The Post in a statement.
“You can simply upload an image to the Gemini app and instantly confirm whether it was generated using Google AI.”
A spokesperson for OpenAI said the company allows public figures to submit a form to prohibit AI-generated content using their likeness. The spokesperson added that OpenAI prefers to focus on preventing sexual deepfakes or content that incites violence.
Representatives for xAI, which runs Grok, did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Mayor Vince Lago of Coral Gables, Fla., posted a fake image of Maduro seemingly being escorted by Drug Enforcement Administration agents on Instagram. It had more than 1,500 likes and was still online as of Tuesday morning.
Lago’s office did not immediately answer a request for comment.
Along with the Maduro deepfakes, social media was flooded with fake and misleading videos of Venezuelans appearing to rejoice in the streets of Caracas after the US raid.
An account called Wall Street Apes, which has 1.2 million followers on X, posted a video purportedly showing Venezuelans crying in the streets of Caracas and thanking Trump for removing Maduro as leader.
The video – which reached over 5.7 million views – was AI-generated and apparently originated from TikTok, according to fact-checkers at BBC and Agence France-Presse, as well as an X “Community Note.”
“The people of Venezuela are ripping down posters of Maduro and taking to the streets to celebrate his arrest by the Trump administration,” MAGA influencer Laura Loomer wrote in a post on X, along with a video of a poster of Maduro being taken down.
But the footage was originally filmed in 2024, according to Wired. Loomer has since deleted the post.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed “millions” of Venezuelans were flooding the streets of Caracas to celebrate the capture of Maduro, reposting an aerial video showing thousands of people cheering in Venezuela’s capital.
The video, which remained up as of Tuesday morning, racked up more than 2.2 million views. Attached to the post was a “Community Note” – the crowdsourcing form of fact-checking used on X, Elon Musk’s platform – that said the video clips were actually from 2024.
Jones also posted one of the AI-generated images flagged by NewsGuard, and replied to a post about the raid on Venezuela with a video appearing to show missiles raining down on a city.
A “Community Note” labeled the video “misinformation,” claiming it was “an old video from Israel-Iran tensions in 2024.”
“I did not say it was from Venezuela,” Jones wrote in another post. “People jumped to their own conclusions and projected their own error on to me.”
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