On Monday, May 22, a picture purporting to show an explosion at The Pentagon, the home of the US Department of Defence, in Arlington, Virginia, quickly went viral on social media. The picture is phoney and looks to be artificially created.

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The Pentagon acknowledged to AFP Fact Check that there had been no such explosion on the property. Beyond the popular AI-generated image, there were no official US reports of the explosion and no local photos were released.

Other users and journalists drew attention to inconsistencies in the image that indicated it was artificial intelligence (AI) created, such as the blurring of objects and landscapes rather than their sharp definition, which is a common trait of many AI-made photographs.