The Nigerian Presidency has dismissed claims circulating on social media that a recently released photograph of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu with Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Paris was generated using artificial intelligence.
In a statement issued on Monday, Temitope Ajayi, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, said the controversy arose from the poor quality of the original image, which was taken with a mobile phone during the leaders’ meeting on Sunday.
“The narrative that the picture of Presidents Bola Tinubu and Paul Kagame taken in Paris yesterday was AI generated is not correct,” Ajayi said. “The picture is real and not AI generated as claimed.”
He explained that President Tinubu and President Kagame had lunch together in Paris before later joining French President Emmanuel Macron for dinner the same day. According to him, the photograph was initially unclear due to the limitations of the phone camera used, prompting efforts to improve its clarity.
Ajayi said an image-editing tool, Grok, was later used solely to enhance the picture’s quality, stressing that this did not mean the image was artificially created.
“The photographer only later used Grok to improve the picture quality. That is not a reason to conclude it was AI generated,” he added.
The clarification followed widespread online debate after the image, shared via President Tinubu’s official X (formerly Twitter) account to announce the meeting with Kagame, was found to carry a visible Grok watermark. The watermark led to speculation that the image had been generated or altered using the artificial intelligence tool developed by Elon Musk’s xAI.
The Presidency maintained that while AI technology was used to enhance the image, the photograph itself was authentic and captured during the actual meeting between the two leaders.
