Fact check: Image of statue resembling Jimmy Savile was generated by AI

Synthetic picture does not show a real statue and was never intended to resemble children’s author Roald Dahl.

Wednesday 27 November 2024 16:56 GMT

Dominique Lynch views Daniel Arsham’s Unearthed, Bronze Eroded Melpomene, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. (Danny Lawson/PA) (PA Archive)

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An image shared on Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, purports to show a statue of children’s author Roald Dahl that has been put on show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to mark 100 years since the publication of his first book.

It has attracted attention from social media users for a resemblance to the serial sexual abuser Jimmy Savile.

Evaluation

The image was generated with an AI tool by a Reddit user two years ago, and was intended to resemble Savile. A satirical Facebook group joked that it was intended to be an image of Roald Dahl and invented a centenary celebration, as the author’s first book was published in 1943.

The facts

A reverse image search on the picture found its earliest known appearance in a post on the social media website Reddit from December 24, 2022. Submitted to a section of the site devoted to “weird AI generations”, the shared image is the fourth in a gallery of images showing a “statue of Jimmy Savile”. The gallery is labelled as having been created with Stable Diffusion, a generative AI image creator.

On November 24, the image was posted to a Facebook group that labels itself as satirical, with a caption claiming it was intended to depict Roald Dahl “to mark 100 years since the beloved author published his first book”.

The children’s author was born in Wales in 1916. His first children’s book was not published until 1943, meaning its hundredth anniversary is still 19 years away. His first published writing was in 1942.

The image and the false caption relating to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park was then posted to other Facebook groups and other social media platforms which repeated the claim that it was a real image of a Roald Dahl statue.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park told the PA news agency: “The ‘story’ and images are AI generated fakes that just serve as poor click bait. It has no association whatsoever with Yorkshire Sculpture Park.”