'Their supposed policies for working people are fake, they spin stories that are fake and now we know even their campaigners are fake.'
Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice has shared a photo on social media of campaigners out on the campaign trail which has several tell-tale signs of AI manipulation.
Tice posted a picture of smiling Reform supporters holding placards in a photo that he said was taken in Birmingham.
However, analysis by Peryton Intelligence, a digital intelligence company specialising in online hate and manipulation, found that the image was almost certainly manipulated using AI, according to a Guardian report.
The company said that a campaigner in the photo had “extra long fingers on her left hand and what appear to be six fingers on her right”. The analysis added that one of the campaigners “doesn’t appear to be gripping his sign at all”.
The analysis also said that “The faces (especially the mouths) of the figures all have a ‘smear’ to them”.
The placards themselves also blur the word ‘Starmer’ and the ‘O’ in Reform is “inconsistently circular”.
“The road sign in the back of the image has a blank white box underneath it, and there are other inconsistencies and blurs in the houses and windows behind the figures too,” the company said.
Zack Polanski, leader of the Green party, told the Guardian: “There’s nothing real about the Reform party. Their supposed policies for working people are fake, they spin stories that are fake and now we know even their campaigners are fake.”
In the caption, Tice remarked that he spent weeks in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington in 2022, where Reform only received 293 votes in a by-election.
On Sunday, he wrote on X: “Yesterday, I returned to Erdington and everything had changed. The support, the recognition and the mood was something I had never quite seen before.
“On May 7th, this part of Birmingham is extremely likely to elect Reform councillors, and in a general election it could go even further and elect a Reform Member of Parliament. That possibility felt distant four years ago. It does not feel distant now.”
Reform denied that the campaigners or the photo were fake.
A Reform spokesperson said: “The photograph is real, however the version Richard Tice posted was slightly edited using AI, mainly to increase the brightness.”
Image source: Richard Tice/X
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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