From AFP
AI-enhanced image depicting shooting of Minnesota nurse includes hallucinations
By Gwen Roley
Social media is awash with graphic footage from the moment US federal immigration agents shot and killed 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but one supposed frame from the scene was manipulated using artificial intelligence. Experts confirmed the image was a synthetic enhancement of authentic video of the shooting, as is evidenced by one figure missing his head.
“It’s on video and here is a freeze frame,” reads the caption of a January 25, 2026 Facebook post sharing the visual.
In the image, agents surround and point a gun at the head of a man, assumed to be Pretti, who is kneeling on the ground...
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information (archived here), told AFP the GetReal Security lab he co-founded also concluded the image was an AI enhancement of a real video frame. He said this type of AI-generation has become popular as users try to create clear images from original but low-quality videos.
“The issue with these images is that the AI enhancement tends to hallucinate details,” he said in a January 26 email...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
