As the 18th season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) unfolds, a set of images featuring Punjab Kings co-owner Preity Zinta alongside team skipper Shreyas Iyer has gone viral on social media.
The above picture can be seen here (archive)
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked these images, and found them to be AI-generated.
A Reverse Image Search yielded no credible sources linking these pictures to any real event. Moreover, neither Preity Zinta nor Shreyas Iyer has shared or acknowledged these images on their official social media handles.
A closer look at the visuals reveals tell-tale signs of AI manipulation — unnatural facial expressions, inconsistent lighting, awkward texture blending in the background, and subtle distortions, particularly around the faces.
Additionally, running the images through Hive Moderation, an AI detection tool, we found the visuals to be artificially generated.
Therefore, we can conclusively say that the viral images claiming to show Preity Zinta posing with Shreyas Iyer are digitally created.
