A photograph appearing to show Thai police officers in elaborate sequinned dresses surrounding a handcuffed drug suspect went viral this week — only for it to emerge that the image had been entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The arrest itself was genuine, carried out by officers from Tha Luang police station in Thailand's Chiang Rai province, but the colourful undercover disguises existed only in software. The fabricated image made it onto the front page of Britain's Daily Star and into picture stories in the Telegraph, the Sun, and the New York Post, all of which treated it as an authentic photograph because it had been posted on what appeared to be an official police Facebook account.

The administrator responsible for the station's social media page later acknowledged creating the AI-generated image to give the police