Image claiming U.S. struck painted fighter jets at an Iranian base was AI-made
A photo circulating on social media claims that Iran painted images of fighter jets on an airbase to deceive the United States and Israel, and that the U.S. mistakenly launched an airstrike on the fake aircraft. A Dismislab fact-check finds the claim to be false. The image was generated using Google’s artificial intelligence tools.
On March 6, 2026, a Facebook page named Suman Kais posted the image. The caption claimed that the United States carried out a “precise strike” on what it believed were Iranian fighter jets, and that CENTCOM later released footage of the attack from its verified account. The post further claimed that Iran had announced the jets were not real aircraft but part of a deception strategy designed to mislead U.S. and Israeli forces. According to the caption, Iran said it had employed the same tactic at more than a hundred airbases, while storing its actual fighter jets in underground facilities.
The image shows what appears to be a top‑down satellite view of an airbase, with three fighter‑jet‑like shapes painted on the ground. The middle shape appears to be destroyed inside a large crater.
By the time this report was written, the post had received more than 224,000 reactions, shared over 12,000 times, and attracted more than 6,500 comments. Several other Facebook pages and profiles (1, 2) also shared the same image with similar claims, and the image was found circulating on X (1, 2) as well.
To verify the claim, Dismislab analyzed the image using Google Gemini’s AI‑detection tool, SynthID. The analysis revealed that the viral image is not a real photograph or satellite image but was generated by artificial intelligence. SynthID detected a watermark embedded in the image, indicating that it had been created with a Google AI model. The tool also marked the confidence level of its finding as “high.”
To further illustrate its assessment, SynthID generated a heat map that visually highlighted the AI‑generated sections of the image. The map displayed a blue overlay across the entire image, confirming that it was produced by artificial intelligence.
