Image of Jeffrey Epstein, boys was posted on an artificial intelligence art account

An image circulating on social media appears to show the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein standing on a beach with four boys, his arm around one of them. 

But it appears that this image originated on an Instagram account that posts pictures generated by artificial intelligence.

It was posted by the account @aiartistking on March 28 with hashtags including #funny #meme and #midjourneyai. Midjourney is an AI image generator that recently created fake images of former President Donald Trump being arrested and Pope Francis in a white puffy coat. 

@HoaxEye, a Twitter account that debunks viral altered images and unearthed the image of Epstein, noted on March 8 that Hive Moderation, a program that aims to detect AI-generated content, found that there was a 99.9% likelihood that the image was created using artificial intelligence. 

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"California lawmakers are planning to push free abortion pills on all students across the state as part of a ‘super progressive’ new policy."

Searching for the image elsewhere online, we found no credible sources to corroborate that this is a real photo, such as news organizations sharing it — as they have with other Epstein photos — or in photo databases, such as this Getty Images collection of more than 700 photos of Epstein.

Epstein was found dead in a jail cell in 2019 in New York while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. The New York City medical examiner’s office concluded that he hanged himself.  

We rate claims that this is a real image False.