"Crocodile racing is a unique traditional festival in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Locals compete by riding crocodiles skillfully along the river," reads a Burmese-language Facebook post on March 10, 2025.
"Tourists can watch the crocodile race up close, so if you're in Sarawak, Malaysia, make sure to go and see it," read the post, which has been shared more than 3,000 times.
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Screenshot of false Facebook post taken on March 17, 2025
The images of people apparently riding crocodiles on a river spread elsewhere on Facebook and Instagram.
Some users' comments indicated they believed the images are genuine.
"They are amazing people," wrote a user in the comment, while another said, "I would like to go there and compete."
Malaysia's eastern state of Sarawak on Borneo island is home to an estimated 25,000 crocodiles, and the local government has announced plans to reduce conflicts between humans and the reptiles (archived link).
And though the state hosts the "highly anticipated" annual Sarawak Regatta -- a tradition dating back to 1872 -- it does not involve riding crocodiles, a spokesperson for the Tourism Board of Sarawak told AFP (archived link).
AI inconsistencies
A reverse image search on Google led to several other posts sharing the pictures, but the search engine's "About this image" feature indicated these images were generated with Google AI.
A Google spokesperson told AFP when a SynthID watermark is detected, it indicates that "the image has been generated or modified with AI".
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Screenshots from Google Images, with the AI label highlighted by AFP
SynthID is an image identification tool launched in 2023 by Google's DeepMind AI lab, which detects digital watermarks contained in images generated with Google AI (archived links here and here).
Experts told AFP the images showed inconsistencies typical of AI-generated pictures.
Shu Hu, head of Purdue University's Purdue Machine Learning and Media Forensics Lab pointed out the reflections under the crocodiles that "violated fundamental principles of optics and physics" (archived link).
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Screenshots of the images with the visual discrepancies highlighted by AFP
Hu said a face of one of the people in the images also lacked realistic facial details and the crocodiles had different numbers of claws on each foot.
Siwei Lyu, director of the University at Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab also highlighted other inconsistencies, such as blurred faces and text on the t-shirt of a man in the third image (archived link).
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Screenshots of the images with the visual discrepancies highlighted by AFP
Meanwhile, two of the images feature a building in the background that appears to resemble Sarawak's legislative assembly building, which sits on the banks of the Sarawak river (archived link).
However, an AFP photo and Google Street View imagery show the genuine building has a different shape and facade (archived links here and here).
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Screenshot comparison between the AI-generated image (left) and AFP photo (right)
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Screenshot of Google street imagery, taken on March 19, 2025
AFP has debunked other false claims misusing images generated using Google AI.