Shortly after the crash of Air India Flight AI171 in Ahmedabad on Wednesday, AI-generated images claiming to show the aftermath of the wreckage began circulating across social media.
This adds to the growing trend of using AI to exploit tragedies for sharing social media content and rack up engagement. In April, following the Pahalgam terror attack BOOM found a large number of users applying the Studio Ghibli filter to create AI-generated versions of an image of a survivor with her slain partner next to her. Last year, following the gruesome rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata, AI was widely used by content creators to swap the face of the victim into their content.
India saw its worst air disaster on June 12, 2025, when an Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner flight from Ahmedabad to London crashed on a medical students' hostel shortly after take-off with 242 passengers on board. The death toll is currently at 269—including 241 on board, and 28 on ground.
AI Frenzy Strikes Again
Shortly after the crash, BOOM found a post on X about the crash, which showed an aircraft with Air India logo ablaze over a building.
Click here to view an archive of the post.
The unnatural and unusual nature of the image was a quick giveaway of its synthetic nature. We also ran it through AI image detection tools Was It AI and Hive Moderator, with both further confirming that it is AI-generated.
Looking further, we found more such images being shared with captions claiming it to be from the crash.
One of the images (archived here) showed rescue workers with missing heads and unnatural hands.
Another image showed an aircraft with the Air India logo crashed into a residential building and engulfed in unnatural fire and black smoke.
Another image (archived here) showed an unnatural wreckage of an aircraft in front of "AHMEDAD AIRPORT".
An image showed the wreckage (archived here) of the tail-end of an aircraft containing the Air India logo, covered in unnaturally looking fire.
BOOM ran all these images through various AI image detectors, with all of them indicating a high likelihood of them being AI-generated. However, none of these posts contained a disclaimer indicating synthetic nature of the images.
