Did Ronaldo finally get married? Don’t fall for this AI fakepublished at 13:41 British Summer Time
Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify journalist
We’ve been looking at a picture that’s been surfacing on social media which appears to show Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo marrying his long-time partner Georgina Rodriquez.
It’s one of a number of pictures and videos going viral showing the couple seemingly tying the knot.
This black and white shot has gathered more than 5 million views in a single post on X at the time I’m writing this.
If you scrolled past this picture on your feed you probably wouldn’t look twice.
Anyone who follows Ms Rodriquez on Instagram, external will know they only got engaged last week so a wedding this soon seems unlikely.
So what’s going on here? Well let’s take a closer look at the picture – especially their hands.
As you can see, their fingers appear deformed, like they’re melting into each other.
Strange-looking hands are a common sign of AI-generation.
Experts say this is because the AI image generators available today struggle to understand the three-dimensional geometry of a hand.
This isn’t a problem if you want a generic image of a hand, but as soon as you prompt an image generator to show one doing anything more geometrically complex – like intertwining fingers – it will struggle to accurately recreate it.
The technology is evolving rapidly, but for now if you suspect an image might be an AI fake – a good place to check first is the hands.