These photos of F-15 airmen being rescued from Iran aren’t real; they are AI-generated

The risky rescue of two American service members from Iranian territory sounds like the plot of an action movie, with a colonel stranded in the country for almost two days after he and a pilot ejected from an F-15E fighter jet that Iranian forces shot down. The two-man crew was later rescued in two different missions. But so far, the U.S. military has not released images from either operation — and artificial intelligence is responsible for the cinematic rescue scenes spreading on social media.

The pilot’s April 3 rescue involved the deployment of 21 military aircraft that faced heavy fire, President Donald Trump said a few days later. The injured colonel, who landed miles away from the pilot, had to climb treacherous mountain terrain, waiting close to 48 hours before U.S. special forces could extract him, Trump said.

Purported images of their rescues drew awed responses online. One showed a smiling man wearing a combat uniform and holding an American flag surrounded by other service members in what looks like a military plane. 

"I’ll never forget this picture on each & every Easter Sunday. Rescued," read an X post by John Bolaris, a realtor and TV meteorologist, with over 791,000 views. 

A Facebook user posting the image said, "Here is the photo of the honorable Colonel being rescued yesterday."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., shared and then deleted the photo on their X accounts.

Conservative commentator David J Harris Jr., shared another image April 5, claiming to show the rescue of the American pilot from Western Iran. But this photo was also fabricated using artificial intelligence.

One of the X posts sharing the photo of the colonel has a "Made with AI" label. 

Neither U.S. Central Command nor the U.S. government have released images of the rescued service members.

V.S. Subrahmanian, a Northwestern University computer science professor, and Marco Postiglione, a postdoctoral researcher who works with Subrahmanian, told PolitiFact the image of the colonel with a flag was likely generated with artificial intelligence.

(Screenshot of a purported image of a U.S. colonel's rescue has some visual inconsistencies indicating it was created using AI.) 

Subrahmanian and Postiglione also noticed some visual inconsistencies in the photo. A person’s uniform on the left, for example, bears a flag patch that sits at an unusual angle and position on the sleeve. Standard military regulations specify that the flag should be worn on the right shoulder, centered and typically a half-inch below the shoulder seam, they said. Another flag patch on the man to the right of the purported colonel appears on the front of his chest. 

Some other anomalies:

• The colonel’s hand on top of the American flag appears to have an extra finger and looks distorted. 

• The image is grainy and the background is blurred.

• The stripes of the flag are not folding the way they would on a real flag.

Hive Moderation, an AI-detection tool, said the picture was likely generated by GPT Image 1.5., Open AI’s image generation model. 

(Screenshot of Facebook post)

We ran the pilot photo through Hive Moderation as well. These programs are imperfect, but it concluded that it was "99.9% likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content." It said this image was likely generated using the AI-image generator Stable Diffusion XL. 

We rate claims these are authentic photos Pants on Fire!