An AI-generated image circulating online depicts what appears to be President Donald Trump and aide Natalie Harp in an intimate pose. There is no evidence the depicted interaction occurred.After an investigation, a forensic expert has concluded that the image is most likely AI-generated.The investigation into the Trump AI controversyThere has been a rise in the use of AI to create controversial images and videos of not just common citizens but also politicians. That might also be the case with this image of Trump and Natalie Harp allegedly sharing a kiss. When the image first started doing its rounds on the internet, it immediately sparked controversy, with many claiming that it's likely AI generated. View this post on Instagram Instagram PostNow, as BBC reports, it might just be. In a video, the news outlet's Thomas Copeland reports that when he ran the image through the OpenAI detector, it detected the image to have a watermark that indicates it to be AI-generated.Copeland then found blurrier versions of the same image online that had been posted much earlier and more times than the clear one. To make sure both images were AI-generated, he had to find out when the blurry one was first posted and by whom.Copeland used Google's reverse image feature to find out when the blurry image was first posted, which led him to a Democrat influencer, Keith Edwards. Since Edwards has a history of generating other fake images using AI, Copeland reached out to him. However, Edwards claimed that he or his team found the image online and did not create it themselves.Since Edwards did not disclose where or how his team found the image, Copeland reached out to GetReal Security, a digital forensics firm. After doing their investigation, the company's co-founder, Hany Farid, wrote in a LinkedIn post that they received multiple versions of the same image, some of which were evidently fake and had AI watermarks, while some were not so obvious.Farid's final conclusion reads:"After lots of digging and sorting, we have determined that the most likely scenario is the latter: the image is AI-generated and the variants were created in an attempt to conceal visual anomalies and/or watermarks."He also added that GetReal Security believes that a fake image was first generated, its quality was reduced, and it was then made to look extremely real by using enhanced AI. Thus far, all reports indicate the image is fake.While the image has gone viral and many netizens were quick to realize it was AI-generated, it still raises concerns about the ethics of the rampant use of AI to create images and videos.For more articles like this, follow Soapcentral.