Fact Check: These photos DO NOT show the Titan sub’s debris, they are AI-generated

The dramatic search for the five people who boarded the submersible vessel Titan to view the wreckage of the sunken Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean ended on June 22 after pieces of the vessel were found on the ocean floor. According to the US Coast Guard, there seems to have been a “catastrophic implosion”.

Speaking about the prospect of recovering the bodies of the victims, Rear Admiral John Mauger, the commander of the First Coast Guard District, said: “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor.” However, five major pieces of the Titan, including a part of the pressure chamber, the nose cone, the front-end bell, and the aft-end bell, have been recovered.

Soon after this news broke, the internet was flooded with the alleged photos of the Titan debris. Among these was a collage of four images. The first three showed the wreckage of a submersible lying underwater. The fourth featured a pair of shoes and a comb lying on the sandy ocean floor. A Twitter user shared these images and wrote, “Here the images of Titan, Debris field”. The archived version of this can be seen here.

India Today found that none of these images showed the actual debris of the submersible Titan. The US coast guard did not release any images of the Titan debris at the time of writing this story.

‘Prince of deepfakes’

We noticed that many people responded to the viral post and said that the first three photos were AI-generated and were originally shared by the Twitter user “Prince of fakes”.

This led us to a Twitter account called “Prince of Deepfakes (Parody)”. There, we found the three photos in question. There were multiple hints on this person's Twitter account which pointed towards the photos being AI-generated. In one of his posts, a Community Note was added which clarified that this was an artistic impression and not an actual photograph.

“Prince of Deepfakes” shared multiple images created using the AI-based image-generation software Midjourney. Moreover, the account’s bio read: “The whole world is fake news”. It also linked to the website “ madeup.news”, which clearly stated that it had “revolutionised the fake news industry”.

Though we could not independently verify the source of the first three images, it is certain that they were not the actual images of the Titan debris.

What about the fourth image?

A quick reverse search of this image led us to a CBS News report from October 19, 2020. Per this report, this 2004 photo showed the shoes of a possible victim of the Titanic sinking.

We also found this image on the stock photo website Alamy, which noted that the image was provided by the University of Rhode Island's Institute for Exploration and Center for Archaeological Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Ocean Exploration.

To sum it up, unrelated images are being shared as visuals of the Titan debris in the North Atlantic Ocean.