Is it true that Elon Musk went out to dinner with a robot girlfriend? An Instagram post claims to have photographic proof, but the image is fake and was generated by artificial intelligence.
The image shows Musk, owner of X and CEO of Tesla, at a restaurant sitting at a table next to a blonde woman with a grey robotic body.
“Elon Musk announces his first girlfriend (a robot with artificial intelligence),” says the publication August 9th. What kind of world are they preparing?
Others Publications on Instagram and Facebook, in English y españolalso shared the image with similar statements.
The posts were flagged as part of Meta’s effort to combat fake news and misinformation on its platform. (Read more about Our collaboration with Metaowner of Facebook and Instagram).
(Screenshot of Instagram post).
PolitiFact did not find reports truthful or credible statements of Tesla o Musk that he created a robot girlfriend.
By doing a reverse image search, PolitiFact found that the image was published in X by the account @iamnot_elon on July 23. The image is captioned: “Will this be normal soon?”
They are profile in X points out that it is not Musk and that it is a parody account. The account has published Others images created with artificial intelligence, including more Musk images and presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamal Harris.
PolitiFact reached out to Siwei Lyu, a professor at the University of Buffalo, to ask about the use of artificial intelligence.
“This image is most likely generated by AI models,” Lyu said. “There are a lot of artifacts, like Musk’s hands…but also the details of the utensils.” Musk appears to have an extra finger and the utensils look distorted.
There are programs that identify whether images were generated with artificial intelligence. Although these programs are not infallible, one of them, Hive Moderationshowed that Musk’s image has a 99.9% probability of having been generated using AI.
Musk public on July 22 on X that “Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for internal Tesla use next year and hopefully high production for other companies in 2026.”
These robots called Tesla Bot o Optimusthey are not “robot brides.” Robots are capable of performing “unsafe, repetitive or boring” tasks in the workforce, according to Tesla.
On January 15th Musk public an X-rated video of one of the humanoids folding clothes. Musk said that “Optimus” could not yet do that autonomously, but would do so in the future.
At a shareholder meeting on May 16, 2023, Musk presented a video showing that robots can walk and pick things up. The robots were first revealed in 2022.
Tech 4 Peace, un Iraqi verification mediumsignatory of the International Fact-Checking Networkalso reported that the image of Musk with the alleged robot was created using artificial intelligence. The fact-checkers also ran the image through an AI detection program and noticed that the parody account posted other AI-made images.
In 2023, PolitiFact rated similar images of Musk kissing a robot as fake.
The image of Musk sitting in a restaurant with a humanoid robot is not real and there is no evidence that he announced “his first girlfriend (a robot with artificial intelligence).”
We rate this post as False.
Read more PolitiFact en Español reports here.
