The Nigeria presidency has dismissed claims that a recently shared photograph of President Bola Tinubu and Rwandan President Paul Kagame was generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The image, which Tinubu posted on Sunday, showed him having lunch with Kagame. Reports indicated that the two leaders met in Paris, France.
However, the appearance of a Grok watermark at the bottom right corner of the image sparked controversy on social media, with several Nigerians alleging that the meeting was staged using an AI-generated photo.
Grok is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, a company owned by Elon Musk. The tool is commonly used for real-time searches, image generation, and content interpretation, and is frequently tagged by users on X.
Responding to the backlash, Senior Special Assistant to the President on media and publicity, Temitope Ajayi, clarified that the meeting between the two presidents did indeed take place.
According to Ajayi, the photograph was captured with a mobile phone, resulting in low image quality, which was later enhanced.
“The narrative that the picture of Presidents Bola Tinubu and Paul Kagame taken in Paris yesterday was AI-generated is not correct,” he said.
“The picture is real and not AI-generated as claimed,” Ajayi added.
He explained that both leaders met for lunch in Paris on Sunday and later joined French President Emmanuel Macron for dinner the same evening.
“They both later had dinner with President Macron same yesterday evening. The picture was taken with a phone and obviously had poor quality,” Ajayi said.
He further noted that the Grok tool was only used to improve the image quality, stressing that this did not mean the photo itself was artificially generated.
“The photographer only later used grok to improve the picture quality. That is not a reason to conclude it was AI-generated,” he said.
