A Dec. 23, 2024, Threads post (direct link, archive link) claims to reveal the identity of a woman who was burned to death on the New York City subway. The post includes a picture of the supposed victim.
“BREAKING: The subway burning victim’s name was Amelia Carter,” reads the post’s caption. “She was burned alive by an illegal alien on a New York subway. Media is trying to hide her face. Don’t let them.”
The post was reposted more than 1,000 times in two weeks, and similar claims circulated on Facebook and Instagram.
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The person killed in the fire was 57-year-old New Jersey woman Debrina Kawam, according to police. The supposed photo of “Amelia Carter” was generated by AI and began circulating about a week before officials publicly identified the victim of the attack.
A woman died after being set on fire while sitting in a New York City subway car on Dec. 22, 2024, according to New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Officers later arrested 33-year-old Guatemalan man Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, who prosecutors say was deported in 2018 and in the country illegally at the time of his arrest, in connection with the woman’s death.
Zapeta-Calil was indicted on arson and murder charges and is expected to make his first court appearance Jan. 7, court records show.
Social media posts wrongly claiming “Amelia Carter” was the victim began surfacing online before officials identified the victim as Kawam on Dec. 31, 2024. There are no credible news reports about such Carter being identified as the victim.
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Several details indicate the Carter image was created using artificial intelligence, experts told USA TODAY.
The online AI-detection tool TrueMedia.org found “substantial evidence” of manipulation using generative AI.
The close crop of the woman’s slightly off-centered face and her “completely malformed and unnatural-looking” pupils are “telltale signs” the image was created using AI, said Walter Scheirer, a Notre Dame engineering professor whose area of research includes visual recognition.
V.S. Subrahmanian, a computer science professor at Northwestern University, and Marco Postiglione, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern Security and AI Lab, also analyzed the image and determined it was likely generated using AI.
The woman’s hair is pixelated around the edges and blurs near her ear, Subrahmanian and Postiglione noted in their findings, which they shared with USA TODAY. What appears to be a cut-off @ sign overlayed on the photo also suggests the image was cropped or shared from a separate source, they said.
The image was likely created using a model similar to an online AI tool that generates random faces, said Siwei Lyu, a digital media forensics expert at the University at Buffalo.
“One visual sign is that the eyes in StyleGAN2-generated faces tend to have nearly identical x and y coordinates across multiple images,” Lyu said. “When we aligned this image with two other images generated from the StyleGAN2 model, the eyes were located at similar positions.”
USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post and the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
V.S. Subrahmanian, Jan. 4, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Walter Scheirer, Jan. 3, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Siwei Lyu, Jan. 3, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Ron Ozio, Jan. 4, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Betsy Aldredge, Jan. 6, Email exchange with USA TODAY
USA TODAY, Dec. 31, 2024, Police ID woman set on fire in shocking incident on New York City subway car
TrueMedia.org, accessed Jan. 2, Deepfake Detector
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Posts sharing AI photo misidentify subway fire victim | Fact check
