Presented with a photograph circulating after the 24 September 2026 White House state dinner for China's Xi Jinping, Grok replied 'Yes, the photo is real.' It identified the occasion as the state dinner hosted by Donald Trump and Melania Trump for Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan in the East Room, said Elon Musk was seated at the head table holding a spoon (and possibly a fork) near his face, that he wore a black tuxedo and bow tie, appeared 'relaxed and engaged in the moment' and was positioned next to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and concluded: 'This matches the official seating at the September 24, 2026, White House state dinner.' Asked why Musk was holding the utensils, Grok called it a casual mid-gesture pose. Asked once more whether the image was authentic, it said: 'Yes, I'm sure it's real,' adding that there was 'no indication it's AI-generated or manipulated - the people, clothing, room, and moment all line up with the documented event.'
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Expert: Matt Novak, Reporter, Gizmodo (documented Grok's answers and compared the image with Kevin Dietsch's Getty Images original) The photograph Grok vouched for is not real, and the unaltered version was easy to find. Gizmodo published the same table as photographed by Kevin Dietsch for Getty Images: Musk is not balancing silverware in it, and the composition of the circulating image - Musk at the far left beside Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Melania Trump and Xi, with Trump toasting in the background - does not match the photograph of the actual event. What makes this failure worth studying is its shape. Grok did not simply fail to flag a fake; it manufactured corroborating detail that made the fake more convincing than it was on its own. It supplied a seating arrangement, clothing, a plausible motive for an unusual gesture ('a casual, mid-gesture way'), and then anchored the whole description to a real, checkable event - the East Room dinner of 24 September 2026. The March 2025 footage of Musk balancing silverware at a dinner with Trump supplied exactly the prior the model needed: the image looked consistent with something Musk had actually done before, and Grok treated that plausibility as confirmation. The competing tools given the same file disagreed, which is the clearest evidence that none of them was verifying anything. ChatGPT called the image fake; Gemini rejected it and pointed to the giveaway in Musk's hand, describing 'the tines and bowl appearing warped and fused'; Microsoft Copilot said there was insufficient evidence to decide. Three answers to a question with one objective answer, available in the public record. The practical point is narrower than 'AI can be wrong'. A vision model asked 'is this real?' reasons about whether an image is coherent and consistent with what it knows - it has no provenance for the file and does not check it against the original photograph. A confident 'yes' is therefore a statement about the picture's internal plausibility, not authentication, and it should not be treated as one. When a surprising image matters, the check that works is the source: the wire photograph of the event, or a dedicated detection tool - not a chatbot's opinion about a photo it has never seen before and cannot trace. Source: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/grok-altered-trump-xi-dinner-photo-authenticity-1822031
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