Fabien Roussel, the French Communist Party's official candidate for France's 2027 presidential election, held his first campaign rally since declaring his candidacy on Saturday at the Fête de l'Humanité, but a photograph of the crowd gathered behind him has wrongly been branded as AI-generated by social media users, according to a fact-check published by TF1's verification unit, Les Vérificateurs.
The image shows Roussel, the party's national secretary, photographed from behind as he addresses a large crowd during his first campaign speech at the festival. In the bottom left corner of the frame, an arrow appears to hover above the head of one spectator, a detail that internet users seized on as proof of manipulation.
One X account that shared the photo mocked it as an obvious product of artificial intelligence, sarcastically remarking on the image's telltale "AI" look. The post was viewed more than a million times on X, formerly known as Twitter. Another user added that the shape resembled a positioning cursor used in design software, arguing this proved the photo had at least been edited to make the crowd look bigger.
Fabien Roussel and the Fête de l'Humanité
Roussel is the national secretary of the French Communist Party and was designated by the party to run in the 2027 presidential election. The Fête de l'Humanité is an annual festival built around the Communist newspaper L'Humanité, held every September and combining political speeches with concerts and cultural events that draw large crowds.
Les Vérificateurs said the photo showed no technical signs of AI use. The team ran the image through several detection tools and found no indication that it had been digitally altered or artificially generated. Detection tools provided by Google, Meta and OpenAI likewise found no digital watermark attached to the file, a marker those companies use to flag AI-generated content.
Same man, different angles
The fact-checkers also compared the photo with other images taken at the same event by members of the French Communist Party. The man with the arrow above his head appeared in several of those pictures too, photographed from different angles, including shots credited to PCF photographer Pierre Lacaze.
That recurrence, the team said, made it extremely unlikely that the photos had been fabricated.
A headband, not an algorithm
Les Vérificateurs said the man was most likely wearing a simple accessory rather than appearing in a doctored image. The team traced the item to online shops selling a decorative arrow-shaped headband that has been popular among festival-goers for several years, as shown in a TikTok video, and is often worn to help groups spot each other in a crowd. According to the product's description, the headband lets the wearer become the centre of the public's attention.
The episode, Les Vérificateurs concluded, showed that an odd detail in a photograph is not always proof that artificial intelligence was used to create it.
